The Holy Boy

The screenplay, co-written by Strippoli, Jacopo Del Giudice and Milo Tissone, so intelligently commingles the area’s uncanny energies with plausible reality, that you can’t be sure that, driving on a dark night, you might not make a wrong turn and end up in this fictional place. If that happens, maybe don’t dawdle.

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.