Based on a novel by Roberto Alaimo, Daniele Ciprì’s directorial debut IT WAS THE SON (È stato il figlio) is an ambitiously operatic and grandly incoherent misfire. Catapulting the viewer – in a style similar (but rarely as tightly wound) to the Coen Brothers at their best – through a whirlwind of originality and noxious black humour, it still fails to offer anything particularly memorable or impressive along the way.

The film starts with a shabby man sat in a post office, whiling the time away by telling whoever will listen wild stories, one in particular involving a poor family living in a fledgling high rise apartment in a destitute suburb of Palermo, Sicily. The film promptly catches up with said family – the Ciraulos, fronted by the large and boisterous Nicola (Toni Servillo), a larger than life patriarch desperately unhappy with his lot. Spending his days scavenging for scrap metal in an effort to keep his family afloat, all of whom are oppressed by his fixation with leading a more prosperous existence. When his youngest daughter Serenella (Alessia Zammitti) is gunned down and killed as the result of a mafia hit gone wrong, Nicola and wife Loredana’s (the skeletal Giselda Volodi) chequered harmony turns to despair and heartache.

Catapulting the viewer through a whirlwind of originality and noxious black humour, it still fails to offer anything particularly memorable or impressive along the way.

However, when the family learn that they could effectively cash in on Serenella’s death by being rewarded by a tidy government compensation, they begin to splash out on expensive items. Gradually, they pile up a large sum of credit at several local retailers, arrogantly assured that the money will arrive at any moment. As days turn to weeks and weeks to months, the threat of total insolvency begins to loom large over Nicola’s head, so he eventually decides to enlist the smilingly Machiavellian services of a loan shark, who offers cash attached to a handful of severe conditions. Spiralling deeper into debt, Nicola has to make some tough decisions that will, in the long run, lead to catastrophe, but not before he buys the Mercedes he’s lusted after for so long.

Spearheaded by a promising narrative teeming with loose morals, gormlessly comic characters and the burdens of providing for an expectant, but lazy, three-tiered family, Ciprì’s film is certainly a bold and visually dashing oddity made all the more accomplished by his background in cinematography. His camera frantically zips in and out, back and forth between his scenes of erratically performed, maniacally humorous black comedy, like a sloppier Jean-Pierre Jeunet only without the mechanical imagination. As the comedy becomes broader and more chaotic, and Ciprì’s handling of the story becomes disjointed and plodding, IT WAS THE SON becomes distractingly frenetic, disoriented by its own irritatingly mismatched tonal shifts that build towards an unsatisfying experience.