Sicilian Ghost Story

Extraordinary film-making of the highest calibre [contains spoilers]

It's a story of pure horror with no possible hope or redemption for anybody. But we made the film as an act of love for this stolen, forgotten child. The child never had the experience of love, so we thought a love story would be the key to enter this story. Also, you can't change the destiny of the boy, but maybe the ghost of the boy could change the life of the main character, so for us, it was the only way possible to tell the story, from the point of the main character, the girl in love with him.

• Antonio Piazza; "How Sicilian Ghost Story's directors are transforming Italian cinema" (Jack Rear); Verdict (August 1, 2018)

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. It's hard to believe this is only co-writers/co-directors Antonio Piazza and Fabio Grassadonia's second film.

As the lights came up at the screening I attended, I sat in a kind of stupefied silence, staring at the credits rolling on the screen, too flummoxed to really move. This is something that has only happened to me a handful of times, when the (call it what you wish) artistic potency, aesthetic splendour, emotional catharsis has overwhelmed me, and I've turned into a gibbering idiot. To cite some recent(ish) examples: Michael Mann's Heat (1995), Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line (1998), Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream (2000), Stephen Daldry's The Hours (2002), Malick's The Tree of Life (2011), Michaël R. Roskam's Rundskop (2011), and Benh Zeitlin's Beasts of the Southern Wild. Sicilian Ghost Story now joins that venerable list.

On an unconscious level, I was trying to process the wave of emotions sweeping over me, trying to qualify and characterise what I was feeling, and by so during,...