A Sicil­ian Ghost Story

The title of Fabio Gras­sado­nia and Anto­nio Piazza’s sec­ond fea­ture tells only half the sto­ry. Where their sly 2013 debut Sal­vo art­ful­ly turned the tra­di­tion­al gang­ster epic on its head into some­thing small and inti­mate, their new film has a scope and scale that belies the super­nat­ur­al cham­ber piece implied by the title.

The film opens on 12-year-old Luna (Julia Jed­likows­ka) as she tries to fig­ure out the best way to tell her class­mate Giuseppe (Gae­tano Fer­nan­dez) that she’s in love with him. Not that he doesn’t know it already – walk­ing home togeth­er after school, the pair flirt as they have done many times before. But today, Luna is final­ly ready to con­fess every­thing, to do it all prop­er­ly with a hand­writ­ten love let­ter. The hand­some Giuseppe gives the enter­pris­ing girl a kiss, then leaves for what should be a minute. He nev­er returns.

As the sto­ry unfolds and Luna cease­less­ly looks for her lover, it becomes clear that she has more than a teenage crush on him – their con­nec­tion seems almost mys­ti­cal. Indeed, far from a straight­for­ward teen movie, the film evolves in a decid­ed­ly mag­i­cal real­ist style. Even before Giuseppe dis­ap­pears, there is a pecu­liar atmos­phere to their roman­tic walk in the woods.

Wide-angle shots cre­ate an omi­nous sense of dan­ger, as does the fright­en­ing dog that pur­sues the young chil­dren before shred­ding Giuseppe’s back­pack to pieces. Stranger still are the POV shots from some­one or some­thing invis­i­ble look­ing at the chil­dren, glid­ing between the trees. Could it be the spec­tre of the film’s title?

This style, how­ev­er, quick­ly becomes tire­some. Luna is under­stand­ably enraged by the fact that no one seems to care about Giuseppe’s dis­ap­pear­ance, but her unre­lent­ing anger also per­me­ates the film’s aes­thet­ic, ren­der­ing it humour­less, seri­ous in the extreme, even spite­ful. Every char­ac­ter is a source of dis­ap­point­ment for Luna; her moth­er an unam­bigu­ous villain.

With­out offer­ing even a fleet­ing a moment of respite, A Sicil­ian Ghost Sto­ry often feels heavy and stiff­ing, and against its mis­an­throp­ic back­drop the girl’s pas­sion­ate quest looks more like teenage rebel­lion than jus­ti­fied frus­tra­tion. The intel­li­gent­ly struc­tured sto­ry, as well as the strik­ing cin­e­matog­ra­phy from Luca Bigazzi (best known for his fre­quent col­lab­o­ra­tions with Ital­ian film­mak­er Pao­lo Sor­renti­no), feel ulti­mate­ly wast­ed on a dis­ap­point­ing­ly juve­nile and super­fi­cial project.

What dri­ves the film for­ward isn’t the mys­tery around Giuseppe’s dis­ap­pear­ance – its cir­cum­stances are revealed ear­ly on – but whether he can be saved. We even­tu­al­ly dis­cov­er what hap­pened, and the young boy’s stark sit­u­a­tion is shown in par­al­lel to Luna’s. Wait­ing for her, day­dream­ing about her, the boy slow­ly los­es his mind. While this hor­ror gives Luna rea­son for being so wor­ried about him, the way in which the film seems to employ the vio­lence it con­demns as an excuse for its own gen­er­al mis­an­thropy remains trou­bling throughout.

A post-film pay­off – anoth­er jus­ti­fi­ca­tion – brings us back to real­i­ty from this mag­i­cal real­ist aes­thet­ic with an ener­vat­ing thud.