‘The Holy Boy’ review: Paolo Strippoli’s third feature is a warped coming-of-age tale

 Dir. Paolo Strippoli. Italy. 2025. 122mins.

Psychological dread, a warped coming-of-age narrative and a beneficiant slug of Bizarre Catholicism make a heady if unbalanced brew in Italian chiller The Holy Boy. Exhibiting out of competitors in Venice, this story of an outsider arriving in a stranger secluded neighborhood is the third function from rising writer-director Paolo Strippoli, following his co-directed Netflix title A Basic Horror Story and 2022’s Flowing (Piove).

The movie has faint echoes of The Wicker Man, however the youth-heavy forged and nightmarish supernatural content material might generate area of interest worldwide attraction to style followers who not too long ago lapped up Speak To Me and Carry Her Again by Australia’s Philippou brothers. Strippoli and his collaborators undoubtedly have a premise and a visible fashion that brim with invention, however the legal responsibility is an over-crammed, over-extended narrative that doesn’t know when to tug again from febrile overkill.

The Italian title Le Valle dei Sorrisi, or The Valley Of Smiles, refers back to the setting, the Alpine village of Remis — satirically named, because it was the positioning of a horrific prepare crash a number of years earlier than. Now, nevertheless, its inhabitants pleasure themselves on their constructive, upbeat angle — which doesn’t sit effectively with new arrival Sergio (Michele Riondino), an alcoholic, sour-tempered former judo champ who has arrived to work instead instructor.

He rapidly reveals his combative facet to his pupils, and to Michela (Romana Maggiora Vergano), the younger lady who runs the native bar. However, she decides he wants assist, and takes him to see Matteo (Giulio Feltri), a 15-year-old highschool loner. Matteo is the topic of a neighborhood cult, fairly actually: he’s thought-about an earthly angel whose embrace has the facility to dispel struggling. However he additionally possesses extra damaging skills and, given the way in which he’s handled by the neighborhood, it appears a protected guess that adolescent angst will ultimately burst out in spectacular style.

The Holy Boy has a number of key substances that click on with the present zeitgeist of hip, youth-focused horror: notably, a robust and fairly transferring queer dimension in Matteo’s unrequited ardour for a bullying classmate; and an emphasis on trauma, personal and collective, because the motivating power behind all the things. However the movie might need had stronger business attraction on this respect if it had centered extra particularly on the youthful characters, somewhat than making the central protagonist a middle-aged, lugubriously machi man. The movie additionally underuses Vergano (who made a mark because the teenage daughter in Italian retro hit There’s Nonetheless Tomorrow), with Michela stored within the background primarily as love curiosity till she too reveals an agonised backstory.

DoP Cristiano Di Nicola and designer Marcello Di Carlo utilises placing locales — wood-heavy Alpine interiors, a really odd church cum neighborhood corridor — though Di Nicola makes heavy climate of wide-angle lenses for claustrophobically oppressive impact. As soon as the movie totally shifts up into climactic gear, Strippoli boldly depends extra on crowd choreography than on particular results, however he miscalculates in stacking ending upon ending, in order that the Gothic frenzy tends to obscure the subtler thematic components such because the depiction of outsider isolation, in addition to musings on the need of ache and sorrow in preserving us totally human.

One other drawback is the glum central presence of Riondino, whose Sergio stays an abrasive determine even as soon as his tough edges are smoothed off. However there’s sturdy assist from the character ensemble, and a formidable displaying by newcomer Feltri, whose enigmatic presence because the archetypal classroom ‘bizarre child’ (androgynous sensitivity, silver-streaked hair and all) maintains a baseline of human nuance, regardless of the movie’s gradual spiral in the direction of the out-and-out frenetic.