Abel Ferrara’s new film shows that, like Paul Schrader, he has moved away from the world, the flesh and the devil to a restless contemplation of that spiritual struggle that was there all along. This is a strange, rather baffling film – stark and austere, a stylised, theatrical bad dream in candlelight about the personal torment of Padre Pio and his private spiritual agony as a young priest in the few years that immediately followed the first world war.
The actual Pio, who died in 1968 and was canonised in 2002, became a controversial figure for his apparent stigmata, but the film shows none of this. He is played with a highly combustible mix of sadness, rage and anguish by a heavily bearded Shia LaBeouf, but in terms of screen time Pio/LaBeouf is not in the film that much.
