Surprisingly good movie based on novel by the late, great Roberto Bolano

The Future (Il Futuro, 2013), dir Alicia Scherson (I had to look it up) is a very powerful and surprising film, based on a short novel by Roberto Bolano, who died way too young but left behind many excellent novels and stories, most not published in his lifetime. The story is pretty straightforward: a 19-year-old woman and her 17(?)-year-old brother, living in Rome (but of a Chilean family) are orphaned when their parents die in a car crash. Visited by Rome social services (a completely phony and feckless social worker - to me, the one sour note in the film, such a familiar and unfair target - would have been better had the made the children victims of an overburdened system rather than of an incompetent worker), they get the OK to live on alone, although they're completely unable to do so: piles of laundry and pizza boxes build up, dishes overflow the sink, etc. He begins cutting school and hanging out at a gym - and eventually brings two trainers back to the apt where they settle in; at first, very well - they're more mature than they look, and the cook and clean, etc. - but eventually lead the kids toward a criminal enterprise, trying to rip off an aged reclusive movie star, sending the woman to him as a prostitute. He actually treats her very well and they develop a fondness for each other, which in a sense saves her from herself. It's a movie that could have gone wrong in so many ways: could have been too violent and mean or, on the other hands, too sentimental and melodramatic, but Scherson finds just the right tone, keeping up our sympathies for the main characters without making any of their adversaries into real heavies. The movie just hovers on the edge of the realistic, with a few notes of gothic horror and sexual exploitation to keep it edgy but not off balance; some beautiful shots, esp at night, of purportedly Rome (although some scenes shot in Germany and Chile). In short, a very watchable and engaging movie about real people in a time of great struggle who live through their difficulties and emerge damaged but stronger - not exactly an upbeat film, no "Hollywood ending," but a dark film with an ending that holds forth at least the possibility of hope.