The isolated Italian village of Discount is not much more in the context of the crackling supernatural horror of Paolo Strippoli “The Saint-Boy” than the road that crosses it, a high school, a tavern and the low roof houses which house an unusually satisfied community. Discard is such a happy place, in fact, that the city motto is “Valley of Smiles”. But it is also ordinary, dull even – the scenario, co -written by Strppoli, Jacopo del Giudice and Milo Tissone, intelligently commanding the strange energies of the region with a plausible reality, that you cannot be sure that, by driving a dark night, you might not make a bad turn and finish in this fictitious place. If this happens, maybe don’t fear.
Again, you may not have the choice, like the former Judo Champion star, Sergio Rossetti (a Michele Riondino, superbly crumpled) who was attracted to a temporary job teaching EP to the local school. It is hardly an assignment of plum, but Sergio tries to overcome his sorrow and his guilt for a recent loss, and maybe that will not find him here. Admittedly, his arrival is great news in a small town. The teachers align themselves to greet him and the students painted a welcome banner celebrating his victory of advanced judo. Sergio demolishes it and makes the class work.
But he is not by nature an austere man, and Riondino plants a little spark of mind deep in the self-delicacy of the character. Later, one of his students, Matteo (an excellent newcomer Giulio Feltri), will complain “you will always enjoy”. To what Sergio replied: “I used to, and now I’m again, thanks to you.” Miraculously, Matteo has removed his pain. This first night in Délé, boastful and drunk, Sergio’s trauma had been so obvious for Michela (Romana Maggiore Vergano) the sympathetic bartender of local pub, that she let him enter the secret of the city. Matteo, a strange and lonely man of 15 years with a band of albinism affecting a temple, a eyebrow and a half-eyelash, has the ability to suppress the misfortune of a tormented soul, simply by tightening them. During regular ceremonies led by local priest Don Attilo (Robero Citran) and funded via a basket of discreet donations, Matteo kisses city dwellers one by one, according to a strict calendar organized by its director, Mauro (Paolo Pierobon). He does not erase their memories. It simply hurts memories.
As a community, awarded was seriously injured. A decade and a half before, a train derailment in the region cost dozens of lives, and many inhabitants have lost dear beings. We hear about it through the radio reports that play the film’s prologue to the film terribly: while the news in the number of assembly victims is cooling in the background, a mother tries the old aircraft routine so that her baby eats her food. Suddenly, in the midst of Vrooo, her expression turns into one of emerging fear and she falls to the ground. Was there – a horrible thought – something in the eyes of the off -screen baby who stopped his dead heart in his chest? Oh wait, no. It’s much worse than that.
This rhythm one one where a bad thing is done only immediately is immediately followed by something more awful, repeats itself throughout and gives a story that is dark in its themes an atmosphere of biting moralization in its presentation. And nowhere is the double-punch more obvious than in the progressive exploration of superpower, less benign of Matteo who, say, opens all kinds of questions on consent and violation. Matteo may be saint perhaps, but he is also a 15 year old monster without a friend with awake sexual desires and the ability to explore them in a unique destructive way but not found. And how should he be a lonely teenager with a gay crush for an antagonistic classmate, who also happens to be adored like a quasi-messia? Only Sergio, not only grateful for the analgesic embrace of Matteo, but also to use it to fill the hole in the shape of a thread in his own life, cares to ask.
There is a little “Carrie” and “The Omen” here, a suspicion of “The Village” and a sign of the head, in the crisp cinematography but in bad humor of DP Cristiano Di Nicola, to retain scandi-horrors like “Let the right one in” and “The innocents”. But “the holy boy” is his own thing, now his moral ambivalence even if it accelerates to a spectacular finish. The intrigue and the character are elegantly established around an surprisingly melancholic nucleus, which reminds us that we need pain in our lives, even when our lives are made unlivable by this pain. Matteo, Halo in the promise of an end to all the sufferings, must look like an angel, but sometimes the ultimate curse is to get exactly what you think you want. The devil was once an angel too, and maybe he was 15 years old when he fell.
