‘The Holy Boy’ Review: Folk Horror Worth Canonizing [Venice Film Festival 2025]
Horror is internal. Monsters and slashers are scary, but it’s the threat they pose to our hearts and minds that lingers the longest. Director Paolo Strippoli’s immensely unsettling Italian chiller The Holy Boy reaches straight through the chest to grab hold of your heart and squeeze it dry. This is Don’t Look Now levels of unrelenting grief and a cautionary tale of compartmentalizing the ugly feelings we’d all rather just avoid.
Remis is a secluded Italian hamlet, ostensibly harmless in that Midsommar “I’d live there without all the horror” kind of way. Marred by tragedy—a train crash that left several dozen dead—the quaint village seems to be doing just fine. Everyone is smiling. The local tavern is bustling. Even the school children seem engaged and earnest in their education. It’s small-town living for small-town folk, just the kind of place Sergio Rossetti (Michele Riondino) might hope to start anew after accepting a temporary PE teaching job.
Sergio’s impetus is all too familiar. Consumed by grief, he reckons it’s better to remain on the run, leaving bereavement and heavy, ugly things in the rearview mirror. If they never catch up, they never need to be dealt with. It’s fantasy in the most human sense. It’s a wish we’ve all had at one point or another, even though it’s a knowingly impossible task. Grief is tricky that way, and it’s faster than us all.
So it seems, at least, until his regular encounters with odd boy Matteo and an unfortunate crash out at the local bar invites the sympathy of bartender, Michela (Romana Maggiore Vergano). She escorts Sergio to Folk Horror Heaven, an underground chapel with the simplest of procedures. Hug Matteo, and your pain and heartache will cease. Matteo’s ability, a kind of supernatural Prozac, doesn’t eliminate the grief; it simply renders it innocuous. The memories endure, but they don’t hurt at all. It’s Linkin Park’s Numb for the rural Italian soul.
The dread-inducing goings-on escalate pursuant to the rhythms of all messiah tales post-Spider-Man. All that great power and great responsibility, compounded here, unfortunately, by Mattero’s nascent queer desires and inability to fully understand the scope of his miraculous, ambiguous powers. Dreadful deeds and violent punches pile up, though, since this pain doesn’t hurt anymore, everyone desperately, fruitlessly carries on as normal, accepting what deathly consequences might await in return for a life lived joyously.
Cinematographer Cristiano di Nicola’s astute and brooding conceptualization of Remis calls to mind the Italian classics of yesteryear, those folk havens harboring sinister secrets, Giallo by way of Thomas Tryon’s Harvest Home. Matteo’s fall from grace burns slowly until it erupts in a tragic, heartrending finale, with delicate character threads merging to leave one key axiom amidst the bloodshed. Angels can be devils, too. There are no cheats to make up for a life lost to pain. We must simply endure it lest we invite something even more horrifying. What a holy horror experience, indeed.
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The Holy Boy
Summary
A holy experience in folk horror worth canonizing.
Categorized: Reviews
