Gianfranco Rosi's Notturno (2020) lays a subtle but consistent formal emphasis on the air. This article argues that Rosi’s filmmaking technique privileges patience and stasis and that it consequently allows manifestations of the air, including wind, breath, bubbles and smoke, to attain prominence in his shots. I draw on the work of Gernot Böhme, Tonino Griffero and Robert Spadoni to suggest that the emphasis Rosi places on the air grants the film a pervasive formal unity that literalizes the notion of cinematic atmosphere. I argue that the film’s 'atmospheric aesthetic' offers up the air’s spatial and corporeal complexity as a formal cipher for the film’s themes of separation and connection, and that it offers a way of thinking through Notturno's intertextual relationship to Rosi's previous film, Fuocoammare (2016).