Sergio, a teacher tormented by his past, arrives in Remis — a remote village with a tragic history, now celebrated as the “happiest town in Italy”. Even though he is supposed to be there for a short stint, everyone in town is still very welcoming to him. The town lives up to its reputation.
The staff at the school welcome him with open arms. The typical band of elderly gentlemen who gather at the local bar every night salutes him. He even seems to have caught a vibe with the bar owner, Michela. It feels like the perfect escape, but the town’s serenity is only skin-deep.
Sergio notices that fifteen-year-old Matteo is the only outlier in this town, that everyone else appears to be dancing around the issue whenever these exceptions are raised. So Sergio dismisses his concern and goes about his job with as little enthusiasm as possible. When his past boils over in a fit of rage, anger, and sadness, Michela tells him to follow her to the town’s community center.
In it, he finds Matteo. Every week, the villagers gather around Matteo, basically worshiping him as an angel. Locals claim his embrace can strip away any pain. From this first encounter, the pair creates a bond, each filling in a surrogate role for the other. They can open up to each other like no one else has before.
But what begins as ritual devotion reveals itself as something far more unsettling. As Sergio steps in to protect Matteo, he shatters Remis’s false front and brings out the town’s worst instincts—along with the dark truth about the boy they call an angel.
The Holy Boy is an arthouse horror (we’re not going to risk your wrath calling it the as-advertised or as-promoted “elevated horror”) from Italian director Paolo Strippoli. It is a story that they started to write with Jacopo Del Giudice and Milo Tissone when they were all nearing the end of their time as students at the ultra-competitive national film school, Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome. With fewer than ten students per class, yeah, you have to be pretty good to get in.
With a central premise seemingly drawn from the 1961 episode of The Twilight Zone, "It’s a Good Life," - don’t make the boy in control unhappy - The Holy Boy explores pain, identity, and belonging through a coming-of-age story set in a community that represses suffering. There is also a queer romance element that goes through a similar repression.
The roles of “good” and “evil” are blurred as individuals shift between the roles of protagonist and antagonist. For example, fathers become enforcers when their sons stray from chosen paths that they did not choose for themselves. Also, there is grim satisfaction in watching church leaders do the same (perhaps scared that they will have to do an honest day’s work if Matteo stops serving this small community).
The film’s two leads are excellent. Michele Riondino is Sergio, the father with a tortured past, who finds the opportunity to do the father-son relationship over again with Matteo. Stippoli intently cast non-actor Giulio Feltri to fill the role of Matteo, choosing a non-actor with raw presence, they have said. That performance, particularly in parts of the story that are coming-of-age and queer romance tales, humanizes the spiritually charged mystery and horror elements that dominate the narrative.
Stippoli has stated that they aimed to avoid clichés of horror by creating a believable Italian community where “hugs are more dangerous than chainsaws.” Still, either their love or at least admiration of the horror genre creates some startling images from the film’s prologue to its conclusion. It does include a perfectly executed jump scare partway through that we can only think is a nod to one of the most significant jump scares of all time, that of the Nurse Station Scene in The Exorcist III: Legion. The way that the scare in this film was set up and executed, how could it not be? Unless, we do not know that there is an obvious Italian horror cinema reference?
The Holy Boy evoked the same kind of admiration we felt when first watching Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In back in 2008. That you were watching something beautiful happen on screen, both in story and in visual elements - and you were waiting for the tables to turn and all hell to break loose.
With a sense of visual style that breathes sophistication, and a story that culminates in bursts of frantic energy as the town reaches a state of panic, it is easy to compare The Holy Boy to more recent works like Get Out and Hereditary. It is hard not to call this elevated horror. If they are not careful and continue to make these kinds of art horror flicks, Paolo Strippoli’s name could be mentioned in the same sentence as Ari Aster or Jordan Peele in the not-too-distant future.