Family memories from childhood are seared into any unconscious, for better or worse. This is what happens to Razziddu Buscemi, who suspects that his mental distress isn’t simply the result of a diagnosable illness like schizophrenia, but rather it has roots in something entirely different. He returns to his hometown, Butera, Sicily, upon receiving news of his grandmother’s death, because of this exact reason: to come to terms with a dark legacy.
A bleak and obscure Sicily, far from the sunny postcards with which it is often identified, is the backdrop for a story of curses and ghosts, in which, more than ever, the Po Valley of Pupi Avati’s horrors seems to have relocated to the Caltanissetta area. With the suspense of a gothic thriller and the twists and turns of a folk horror film, Giuseppe William Lombardo uses incandescent narrative material from Orazio Labbate’s novel of the same name to reveal another side of a region that is rife with skeletons in the closet, including the mafia, immigration, and dark rituals.