A child’s gaze can be a skeleton key. It can force the lock of an armoured door, the one behind which adults hide their miseries, their lies, their silent capitulations. In 1943, in an Italy about to implode under the weight of its own historical tragedy, Vittorio De Sica does not merely use this gaze as a narrative device. He transforms it into an optical instrument, a moral lens through which to dissect the hypocrisy of an entire social class and, by extension, an entire nation. "The Children Are Watching Us" is not simply the film that anticipates the neorealist revolution; it is the earthquake that prepares its terrain, a crack opening in the polished, artificial marble of the “white telephone” cinema, revealing the void beneath.

The film chronicles a disintegration: that of little Pricò’s bourgeois family. His mother Nina, beautiful, restless, and impatient, yields to her passion for another man, Roberto. His father Andrea, a meek man defeated from the start, cannot contain the catastrophe. In the middle, of course, is Pricò, played by a four-year-old Luciano De Ambrosis, whose performance is not acting but pure existence captured on film. Here, in his first, crucial encounter with Cesare Zavattini, De Sica makes a radical epistemological leap: he rejects the omniscient point of view and lowers himself, quite literally, to a child’s height. The camera does not simply follow Pricò; in many moments, it becomes Pricò. The adults’ conversations reach us filtered, fragmented, only half-understood. Their legs, their nervous gestures, their tense profiles are often all we see, exactly as a child perceives a drama of which he is a victim but not the architect.

This stylistic choice generates an almost obligatory literary analogy with Henry James’s What Maisie Knew. Like little Maisie, Pricò is the passive catalyst and impotent observer of his parents’ moral decomposition. But where James orchestrates a sophisticated and verbose psychological ballet, De Sica and Zavattini work by subtraction, entrusting themselves to the power of the unsaid, to the eloquence of a close-up, to the crushing weight of a silence. Pricò’s tragedy lies not so much in the events themselves—the adultery, the separation, the suicide—as in his gradual dawning of awareness. It is a sentimental education in reverse, an apprenticeship in sorrow and disenchantment that culminates in a total rejection of the adult world.

The film is littered with sequences that are like daggers to the heart. The scene at the seaside in Alassio, where Nina meets her lover again, is a masterpiece of tension built through minimal details. As the two flirt, believing themselves unobserved, the camera lingers on Pricò building sandcastles, his apparent nonchalance rendering their guilt all the more squalid. His subsequent illness, clearly psychosomatic in nature, is not the whim of a spoiled child but the physical reaction to an emotional poison he has been forced to ingest. De Sica, who came from light comedy and the role of the debonair leading man, demonstrates an almost supernatural sensitivity in directing the young De Ambrosis. The story goes that he never had the boy learn lines, but instead whispered them to him moment by moment, playing with him off-camera to elicit authentic reactions—gazes of a piercing purity and pain.

This approach, which Zavattini would later theorize in his concept of “shadowing” reality, is the spark from which the neorealist inferno would ignite. "The Children Are Watching Us" is still a film shot in a studio, with professional actors (a heartbreaking Isa Pola, a sorrowful Emilio Cigoli) and a classical narrative structure. And yet, the soul of the film is already in the streets, already among ordinary people. It is in the attention to humble details, in the way the family’s economic crisis manifests in the selling of furniture, in the necessity of sending the child to a boarding school. The film tears the veil of Fascist propaganda that celebrated the family as the nation's healthy and incorruptible nucleus, showing it instead as a fragile institution, a hell of private egoisms and impossible happiness. It is not a political film in the strictest sense, but its ruthless examination of the family microcosm assumes a devastating political valence in the context of 1943. To show a father who kills himself out of weakness and a mother who sacrifices her son to her own passion was an act of unheard-of cultural courage.

One could almost see the film as a crepuscular work, akin to the poetry of Gozzano or Corazzini. There is the same attention to “good things in bad taste,” to petty-bourgeois interiors, to an atmosphere of melancholy and existential defeat. The family home is not a nest but a prison of objects and weary habits. When Nina leaves, her absence is palpable, a void that not even her return can fill. Renzo Rossellini’s score (he was Roberto’s brother) masterfully supports this tone, with a main theme that is a deformed children’s lullaby, a melody evoking an innocence already lost at the very moment it is uttered.

But it is in the finale that the film reaches the heights of an absolute masterpiece and projects itself into the future. After his father’s suicide, Nina comes to collect Pricò from his boarding school. The child sees her arrive and stops. She opens her arms, smiling with a desperate hope. And Pricò, after a hesitation that lasts a cinematic eternity, turns and gives her his back. Slowly, with the gait of an automaton, he walks down the long, cold school corridor, ignoring his mother’s calls, and vanishes behind a closing door. The End. This refusal is one of the most radical and devastating acts in the history of cinema. It is not Antoine Doinel’s liberating run to the sea in Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, an interrogative gaze cast toward us. It is a definitive, unappealable judgment. Pricò does not flee toward an uncertain future; he retreats into an affectionless present, choosing the institutional solitude of the school over the corrupt and untrustworthy world of adults, embodied by his mother. With that gesture, the child stops watching and delivers his sentence. It is an ending that freezes the blood, far closer to the ruthless logic of a Michael Haneke than to the sentimentalism often (and wrongly) associated with De Sica.

"The Children Are Watching Us" is a film that continues to stare back at us, nearly a century later. It stares from the rubble of a world that was collapsing and interrogates us about our own responsibilities. It is the birth of a new cinema, one that found its deepest aesthetic purpose in the ethics of seeing. De Sica does not just show us a family’s tragedy; he forces us to live it through the eyes of the blameless, making our role as spectators almost unbearable. And in that final gaze, in that back turning away, lies all the modernity of a cinema that has ceased to console in order to, at last, begin to make us think. And to make us hurt.