La Vita Oscena is a 2014 Italian psychedelic drama directed by Renato De Maria, based on the autobiographical novel by Aldo Nove, in which Andrea loses both his beloved parents to illness while still a teenager — his mother, a free-spirited hippie with whom he shares an obsessive, almost romantic bond, being the last to go. Devastated and unmoored, Andrea spirals into a self-destructive descent of drugs, sex, and reckless living in a desperate attempt to feel something — or to die — haunted throughout by the ghost of his mother's gaze, until he is forced to confront whether he wants to live or let himself disappear completely.