Author: Tyler Hummel

The young Lucia wears the gown of her patron saint. As the eldest daughter of a large Roman Catholic family living in the remote Italian village of Vermiglio, she has taken on the local responsibility of her town’s annual festival for the Feast of St. Lucy, wherein her face is covered with a veil and decorated with a crown of candles. Even with the Second World War raging in the distance, her fellow townsfolk cheer her with songs as she rides her donkey, with the children celebrating as they brag to their friends what small toys and candies the saint gifted them. 

As the Italian-language submission to this year’s Oscar contender for Best International Picture, Vermiglio stands confidently as one of 2024’s most touching, quiet, and achingly painful works of cinema. What starts as a quant slice of life into the picture-esque world of a family sheltering army deserters from war quietly transforms into a nightmare of love, mystery. and betrayal. 

Its ensemble can’t be readily dismissed as mere archetypes, even if all 12+ members of the Graziadei family are occasionally reduced to background characters. The father is stern but realistic about his financial troubles as he struggles to earn enough to care for his children. His second eldest daughter Ada is caught deep in the temptations and anxieties of a young woman, caught between desires she feels the need to punish herself for and her deep faith. The mother is beleaguered but also quietly strong assertive and protective of her children, even in the face of her husband. 

Spoilers to follow: Its story follows the family’s eldest daughter as she falls in love with a Sicilian army deserter who turns out to be a lying bigamist who married two separate women and was ultimately shot and killed by his first wife in defense of her honor. He wasn’t merely a coward running from the war but a man who buries his intentions and motivations too deeply to not seem monstrous. 

The revelation of this truth—coming after Lucia was impregnated by Peitro with a daughter—leaves her catatonic and broken. Her family surround her and casually remark that she “was pretty” and that no man would want a destitute widow with a child. She can’t even bring herself initially to love her baby, Antonia, instead coming close to suicide after leaving the baby crying on her bed. 

Living in a deeply Catholic country, Lucia retains a deep connection to her faith, even if her catatonia has left her seemingly as distant to the rest of the world. Regardless, Catholicism is in the air she breathes. She is named after a saint and a martyr. Her ex-husband is named after St. Peter, the keeper of the keys of heaven and the first pope within Catholic theology. The correlation between Lucia’s character and St. Lucy is no mere quirk or accident. The movie directly draws the comparison by showing Lucia playing the role of the saint as part of her town’s tradition. 

As Anglican writer Fr. D.J. Marotta reflects, St. Lucy was a third-century Sicilian woman who died under the anti-Christian persecution of the Roman Emporer Diocletian. “Her widowed mother suffered from a blood hemorrhage; fearing her imminent death, she arranged for Lucy to marry a pagan suitor. Lucy pointed her mother to the gospel story in which Jesus cured a woman with a similar afflicted. Together they prayed and Lucy’s mother was healed. In thanksgiving, Lucy gave a substantial portion of her dowry to the poor.” 

Angered by this, her fiance would report her to the Roman authorities to be forced into prostitution unless she would apostatize. “But when the soldiers laid hands on Lucy, to drag her away, a miraculous power made Lucy unmovable. Her eyes were then put out and she was set aflame. When the fire failed to harm her, Lucy gave praise to God, and she was killed with a sword.” 

St. Lucy’s brutal torture and death at the hands of her oppressors would make her an inspiration for thousands of millennia of subsequent Christians, with her name taking on double importance as another word for “light”. Liturgical Christians continue to celebrate her life and death on December 13 during the season of Advent. The Catholic Church’s infamous anime-inspired mascot for the 2025 Jubilee year is even named Luce, partly in reference to her. 

The persecution that Vermilgio’s Lucia is forced to endure is far more symbolic than literal. As director Maura Delpero has noted in interviews, her treatment is meant to reveal the patriarchal brutalities of the not-to-distant past. As she tells Screen Slate, “See how they’re yearning for self-determination while still being confined by societal codes. They’re boiling inside, and characters like Lucia experience this shift through her tragedy, and not through feminist theory, which will come in the seventies.”

Lucia exits the film in a moment of life transition, having left Antonia with a Catholic orphanage under the oversight of her sister Ada, who has chosen the life of a nun after grappling with repeated lesbian temptations throughout the film. Whereas her father had previously declared her a “mountain goat” like him who needed life on a farm, she instead has moved to the city to find work to support herself and her child. While she hasn’t forsaken her family, faith, and child, she has transitioned to something new that will allow her to live a new life beyond the betrayal and pain she has experienced. 

Vermiglio avoids being overtly moralistic and giving Lucia any sort of soliloquy on the state of the world. Delpero avoids the “fist in your face” feelings and learns about her own quasi-autobiographical familial connections and experiences to let the story speak for itself, as her family grew up in the real-life town of Vermiglio. This isn’t a story about revolutionary change so much as it is the painful experience of being the recipient of undue suffering. 

The martyrdom she awards to Lucia is personal—shame, isolation, and constraint. She must go out into the world and live a harder life because the man she trusted to care for her turned out to be more complicated than she could’ve ever imagined. While the film is nuanced enough to avoid being didactic, it leans into the heartbreaking realities of the world to show the depths of their crushing nature. But just as St. Lucy went to a heavenly reward, Lucia heals enough to move through her grief on to a better future. 

It brings to mind G.K. Chesterton’s great reflection on women and traditional societies: “I do not deny that even under the old tradition women had a harder time than men; that is why we take off our hats.”

Tyler is a Wisconsin-based freelance critic and journalist, a member of the Music City Film Critics Association, a regular film and literature contributor at Geeks Under Grace, and was the 2021 College Fix Fellow at Main Street Nashville