‘Sacred Creatures’ review: Canadian siblings have a bizarre trip to Italy in ambitious, erratic magical realist debut

Dir/scr: Frieda Luk. Canada/Italy. 2026. 105mins

A siblings’ reunion in rural Italy turns strange in Canadian director Frieda Luk’s first feature. It’s a bold, idea-driven drama that is ultimately undone because it breaks the first rule of that difficult genre, magical realism – the one about the audience needing to believe, at least a little, in the magic.

A film whose multiple readings feel a little like a lucky dip

A stretched and tonally erratic viewing experience, this Edinburgh competition premiere is at its most convincing in the way setting, décor, costume and a musical soundtrack that seems to be playing in a distant room combine to create a kind of existential slippage. The flat Piedmontese landscape south of Turin where two 30-something sisters and their brother – all originally from Toronto – meet up after an unspecified time apart is not the tourist Italy of the nearby Barolo wine country. It’s a place in unresolved transition, where isolated aristocratic farmsteads like the one at the centre of the action survive amidst bland supermarkets, electricity pylons, trunk roads and intensive agriculture.

It’s here that Ray (James Cusati-Moyer) lives with his Italian artist partner Renzo (Antonio De Matteo, soon to be seen in Nanni Moretti’s Venice competition title It Will Happen Tonight), who seems to have inherited this imposing country house. Its architectural details and bucolic frescoes announce it as a former landowners’ retreat, but this thoroughly modern gay couple have given it an overlay of contemporary design and cartoonish pop art. The film opens with the arrival in rapid succession of Ray’s sisters, uptight advertising executive Michelle (Romina d’Ugo) and seemingly fragile Miriam (Olivia Luccardi), whose status as the family problem is established before she even emerges from her room.

Miriam has spent some time in psychiatric care after a psychotic episode that she experienced as a spiritual awakening. That raises alarm bells for Michelle, who sees her sister as a ticking time-bomb. Ray is more accommodating: he clearly feels this holiday in the siblings’ ancestral country (there are several references to a ‘nonna’ or grandma back in Canada) can help her to heal. Local excursions are part of this therapy – but instead, Miriam gleans from them two superpowers that underpin the story’s evolution into a modern-day master-and-disciple satire – or parable? One is a book she steals from a local library, full of banal inspirational maxims (“if you desire it, dream it”). The other is a gold lamé dress that would not look out of place in a school play set in Ancient Egypt.

So begins the film’s problematic second half, in which Miriam becomes the object, for a group of besotted locals, of a cult that has elected her as its calm, beaming leader – swayed by those corny adages, which she reads out in atrocious Italian, and that deflated hot air balloon of a dress, which she refuses to take off. It’s a cult whipped up by Renzo’s bossy aunt, played engagingly by Pia Engelberth as a monied Piedmontese snob with New Age tendencies.

As Renzo’s house fills up with acolytes, and he himself seems to fall under Miriam’s charismatic spell, the staginess of the film’s early scenes curdles into a static series of variations on the idolatry surrounding this reluctant guru, who believes she is undergoing a transition to a higher plane and sees her followers as well-meaning but ignorant primitives.

A restrained, open-ended finale regains some audience trust, but it’s not enough to make us believe in this Italian community’s mute, adoring surrender to the power of a guru whose teachings sound AI-generated. Is this a satire on our credulous times? Or a drama about family members that identify the black sheep in their midst without seeing their own failings? Or a very Canadian black comedy about overseas dangers? Sacred Creatures is a film whose multiple readings feel a little like a lucky dip. But this is still an ambitious debut, confidently staged and shot (despite an over-indulged penchant for extreme shallow focus), that marks writer-director Luk out as a talent to watch.