‘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 generous slug of Weird Catholicism make a heady if unbalanced brew in Italian chiller The Holy Boy. Showing out of competition in Venice, this story of an outsider arriving in a stranger secluded community is the third feature from rising writer-director Paolo Strippoli, following his co-directed Netflix title A Classic Horror Story and 2022’s Flowing (Piove).

The film has faint echoes of The Wicker Man, but the youth-heavy cast and nightmarish supernatural content could generate niche international appeal to genre fans who recently lapped up Talk To Me and Bring Her Back by Australia’s Philippou brothers. Strippoli and his collaborators undoubtedly have a premise and a visual style that brim with invention, but the liability is an over-crammed, over-extended narrative that doesn’t know when to pull back from febrile overkill.

The Italian title Le Valle dei Sorrisi, or The Valley Of Smiles, refers to the setting, the Alpine village of Remis — ironically named, since it was the site of a horrific train crash several years before. Now, however, its inhabitants pride themselves on their positive, upbeat attitude — which doesn’t sit well with new arrival Sergio (Michele Riondino), an alcoholic, sour-tempered former judo champ who has arrived to work as a substitute teacher.

He quickly shows his combative side to his pupils, and to Michela (Romana Maggiora Vergano), the young woman who runs the local bar. Nevertheless, she decides he needs help, and takes him to see Matteo (Giulio Feltri), a 15-year-old high school loner. Matteo is the subject of a local cult, quite literally: he is considered an earthly angel whose embrace has the power to dispel suffering. But he also possesses more destructive abilities and, given the way he is treated by the community, it seems a safe bet that adolescent angst will eventually burst out in spectacular fashion.

The Holy Boy has several key ingredients that click with the current zeitgeist of hip, youth-focused horror: notably, a powerful and quite moving queer dimension in Matteo’s unrequited passion for a bullying classmate; and an emphasis on trauma, private and collective, as the motivating force behind everything. But the film might have had stronger commercial appeal in this respect if it had focused more specifically on the younger characters, rather than making the central protagonist a middle-aged, lugubriously machi man. The film also underuses Vergano (who made a mark as the teenage daughter in Italian retro hit There’s Still Tomorrow), with Michela kept in the background essentially as love interest until she too reveals an agonised backstory.

DoP Cristiano Di Nicola and designer Marcello Di Carlo utilises striking locales — wood-heavy Alpine interiors, a very odd church cum community hall — although Di Nicola makes heavy weather of wide-angle lenses for claustrophobically oppressive effect. Once the film fully shifts up into climactic gear, Strippoli boldly relies more on crowd choreography than on special effects, but he miscalculates in stacking ending upon ending, so that the Gothic frenzy tends to obscure the subtler thematic elements such as the depiction of outsider isolation, as well as musings on the necessity of pain and sorrow in keeping us fully human.

Another problem is the glum central presence of Riondino, whose Sergio remains an abrasive figure even once his rough edges are smoothed off. But there’s strong support from the character ensemble, and an impressive showing by newcomer Feltri, whose enigmatic presence as the archetypal classroom ‘weird kid’ (androgynous sensitivity, silver-streaked hair and all) maintains a baseline of human nuance, despite the film’s gradual spiral towards the out-and-out frenetic.