Sicilian Ghost Story

Name: Sicilian Ghost Story
Genre: Drama, Mystery, Fantasy, Romance, Crime
Released: November 30, 2018
Duration: 122 min
Rating: 70
Cast: Andrea Falzone, Baldassare Tre Re, Corinne Musallari, Federico Finocchiaro, Filippo Luna

2018

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Generally favorable reviews based on 12 Critic Reviews

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Mixed or average reviews based on 5 Ratings

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6.0	User Score Mixed or average reviews based on 5 Ratings

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Sicilian Ghost Story (US Trailer 1)

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Movie Details & Credits

Strand Releasing | Release Date: November 30, 2018 | Not Rated

Starring: Andrea Falzone, Baldassare Tre Re, Corinne Musallari, Federico Finocchiaro, Filippo Luna, Gaetano Fernandez, Julia Jedlikowska, Lorenzo Curcio, Sabine Timoteo, Vincenzo Amato

Summary: In a little Sicilian village at the edge of a forest, Giuseppe, a boy of 13, vanishes. Luna, his classmate who loves him, refuses to accept his mysterious disappearance. She rebels against the code of silence and collusion that surrounds her, and to find him she descends into the dark world which has swallowed him up and which has a lake asIn a little Sicilian village at the edge of a forest, Giuseppe, a boy of 13, vanishes. Luna, his classmate who loves him, refuses to accept his mysterious disappearance. She rebels against the code of silence and collusion that surrounds her, and to find him she descends into the dark world which has swallowed him up and which has a lake as its mysterious entrance. Only their indestructible love will be able to bring her back along.… Expand

Director: Antonio Piazza and Fabio Grassadonia

Genre(s): Drama, Mystery, Fantasy, Romance, Crime

Rating: Not Rated

Runtime: 122 min

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Critic Reviews

Jeannette Catsoulis

Nov 29, 2018

This beautifully realized movie casts a sensitive, secretive spell. Read full review

Movie Nation Roger Moore

Nov 30, 2018

A scenic, poetic, striking and moving thriller about Sicily’s “problem” viewed through the lens of youth and young love. The spooky overtones make its title an honest one, even if the frights are few. This is a “Ghost Story” well worth telling, and seeing. Read full review

Empire Alex Godfrey

Nov 29, 2018

Bewildering in all the right ways, this is a poetic, sublime interpretation of a sorry story. An evocative, emotional experience, it pits humanity against inhumanity, resulting in something refreshingly new. Read full review

Allan Hunter

Nov 29, 2018

The heady fusion of teenage romance, gothic fantasy and Mafia thriller becomes an immersive, atmospheric drama. Read full review

Gary Goldstein

Dec 13, 2018

Although the story can feel chilly and oblique, it gets under your skin. Read full review

The Telegraph Tim Robey

Nov 29, 2018

Summoning ghastly spectres of the real past, with the tragic ballast this one lends, always carries the risk that they’ll frighten mere fictions off the screen. Read full review

Chuck Bowen

Nov 21, 2018

The film is determinedly unclassifiable, blurring genres with a fervor that grows tedious. Read full review

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User Reviews

Bertaut1

Apr 24, 2019

This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. Extraordinary filmmaking of the highest calibre

Sicilian Ghost Story is cinema as art, in the purest sense of the term. Extraordinary aesthetic beauty and not a small amount of technical virtuosity contain a narrative that is emotionally devastating, but also paradoxically uplifting.

Beginning in 1993, Sicilian Ghost Story tells the story of Luna (an extraordinary debut performance by Julia Jedlikowska, who carries the entire film) and Giuseppe (Gaetano Fernandez), two thirteen-year-olds living in Palermo who are slowly falling in love. Giuseppe is the son of a Cosa Nostra hitman who has recently turned state's witness in prison. Everything is relatively normal in their lives until Giuseppe disappears. Deeply upset, Luna is incredulous at the community's lack of reaction. With this in mind, she determines to find him herself, quickly realising that the two share psychic connection, upon which she must rely if she is ever to see him again.

The film is adapted from Marco Mancassola's 2011 short-story "Un cavaliere bianco", about the murder of Giuseppe Di Matteo, son of Santino Di Matteo (known as Mezzanasca), a hitman for the Cosa Nostra, who was arrested in 2013, and became an informer. In retaliation, the Mafia kidnapped his eleven-year-old son, Giuseppe. The plan was to use Giuseppe to silence Mezzanasca, torturing him, and sending pictures to his father demanding that he recant his testimony. However, Mezzanasca refused to cooperate. After 779 days of imprisonment, Giuseppe was strangled to death, and his body subsequently dissolved in a vat of acid. As in the film, Mancassola uses the real-life events as the starting-point for an otherworldly, fantastical narrative which follows Luna's increasingly non-corporeal attempts to find Giuseppe.

Sicilian Ghost Story is a fantasy-based love story first, and a fact-based tale of violence and murder second. Indeed, it could just as legitimately called be Sicilian Love Story. Poetic and magical in equal measure, although it spends a great deal of time within Luna's imagination/unconscious, it remains grounded in the Cosa Nostra-dominated Sicilian culture of the early 90s. Because of this duality, although the film tells an undeniably dark story, Pizza and Grassadonia were able to craft a paradoxically uplifting dénouement, which doesn't feel even remotely out of place or artificially grafted on. Indeed, the only way they could find into telling the story at all was to introduce an element of the fantastical; speaking at Cannes, they state, "the only way to tell the story was for us to create a collision between a level of reality and a level of fantasy. On the level of reality, a dark fable. On the level of fantasy, a romantic fable."

I became aware I was watching something extraordinary in the opening scene. Inside a cave, the camera travels over dark rocks. A weak light emanates from the mouth of the cave, and reflects off the droplets of water on the rocks. As the camera moves, and the screen fills with a black background permeated by soft white spots, one could be looking at an expansive star field rather than being confined inside a cave, a shot which recalls the scene on the driving range in Michael Mann's The Insider, which has a similarly disorientating effect.

The filmmakers also employ a litany of techniques to link, contrast, and compare various scenes. Animal imagery appears throughout; an owl, butterflies, a stout, a dog, spiders, and, especially, horses. On a more technical level, Pizza and Grassadonia's visual trickery is exceptionally accomplished, and they employ it perfectly, always justified by the content; fisheye lenses, Dutch angles, asymmetrical framing, chiaroscuro lighting, soft focus, forced perspective, etc.

Most of the reasons I loved the film so much will be the exact same reasons that a lot of people hate it - narrative ambiguity, only-ever-hinted-at possibility of something ethereal living in the forest, slightly confusing achronological structure, camera trickery, slow pacing, bleak morality, non-diegetic light sources, naturalistic acting, symbolism and visual metaphors, the use of a real-life murder as the subject for an oneiric romance, the (at times) oppressive music, a tacit disregard for genre, two scenes where the narrative progression simply stops completely and there are two four-or-five-minute sequences that don't advance the plot in any way, but which are achingly beautiful, and central to the film's overriding theme - that love can transcend all.

This is cinema as art. Point of fact, it's nothing less than a masterpiece.… Expand

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DawdlingPoet

Nov 28, 2021

This film didn't really work for me. What I mean is, it was relatively atmospheric, quite quriky and there was a somewhat nice sense of atmosphere but I couldn't quite get my head around what was going on in the plot. I usually quite like films that are a bit sombre and quiet, thoughtfulThis film didn't really work for me. What I mean is, it was relatively atmospheric, quite quriky and there was a somewhat nice sense of atmosphere but I couldn't quite get my head around what was going on in the plot. I usually quite like films that are a bit sombre and quiet, thoughtful etc. but this film seemed a bit overly padded, time wise and I felt not too sure quite what was going on. It just didn't quite work for me and yet it looks, at times, really quite good and I felt like I should be following it more than I did. Its good on one level but it doesn't work on another, so overall I can't really recommend it as such, no - it needs more substance to really work well, I feel.… Expand

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