Padre Pio, real-life monk, mystic and one of the big holy hitters of 20th-century Italian Catholicism (Shia LaBeouf), lends his name to this chest-beating, teeth-gnashing period drama from Abel Ferrera. But Pio’s story feels oddly sidelined in a picture that attempts to balance the monk’s ecstatic spiritual suffering with the events surrounding the first free election in a provincial Italy still reeling from the first world war. In effect, this results in a film composed of two barely connected story strands, cobbled together in a way that undermines the dramatic power of both. Ferrera draws inspiration from Italy’s neorealist tradition in the fractious energy of the crowd scenes and the agitated handheld camera. But any authenticity is skewered by the decision to shoot in Italian-accented English, meaning that much of the dialogue sounds as hammy as a leg of prosciutto.
