Compelling true-life Mafia tale gets lost in the woods

The influences of Guillermo del Toro, Stephen King and the Brothers Grimm hover over

Sicilian Ghost Story like predatory wraiths. That said, it isn’t a horror film: it’s inspired by the true-life case of an 11-year-old boy called Giuseppe Di Matteo, who was kidnapped by the Sicilian mafia in 1993 to try to stop his father informing. From this upsetting episode, the makers of the film have fashioned a melodrama tinged with fantasy.

At the end of a school day, Giuseppe (Gaetano Fernandez) and his friend Luna (Julia Jedlikowska) are playing hide-and-seek at the edge of a forest, when they are chased by a snarling rottweiler. The ferocity of this attack is quite something, and the threat of it coming for their throats is grab-yourarmrests palpable. It’s a harbinger of the fate in store for Giuseppe, who later that day is whisked off by his abductors to a cave, vanishing for weeks from his home town of Altofonte, near Palermo. A conspiracy of silence descends, but Luna is having none of it.

Sicilian Ghost Story’s strikingly bold style cuts good ways and bad. The framing of the townscape has a darkly alluring picture-book verve. But the overcranked sound can be reckless, and the image-making strains numbingly. There are shots looking straight up from the bottom of a barrel, and 360-degree pans in the forest, all of which communicate more about the talent of cinematographer Luca Bigazzi (The Great Beauty) than they reveal about the story.

Just when the showing-off is threatening to test your patience, the film springs its most urgently compelling part, capped with one chillingly extraordinary underwater shot. But overshadowed by this genuinely bone-freezing coup, the very end of the story can’t help but seem banal, cursory and prettified.