Given our own country’s impassioned divisions these days between the secular left and Christian right, Italian director Marco Bellocchio has conjured an intriguing premise: an atheist in contemporary Italy discovers his mother is being canonized for sainthood. This is not as distressing, though, as learning that his family has been involved in the beatification process for the last three years without his knowledge. His kin have astutely understood there is something to gain when their matriarch is a saint — celebrity, TV shows, money — even the atheist’s ex-wife decides it can’t hurt for her son to have a most-holy grandmother. But the atheist himself, Ernesto Picciafuoco (played by Sergio Castellitto) hated his mother, whom he remembers as a cold, pious woman, and wants no part in his family’s canonization campaign. Instead Ernesto searches for the ultimate way to declare his atheism which, he decides, is to embrace the spirited life his mother rejected. With understated ardor he pursues the sensual, namely, his work as a painter and falling in love.

The scenes are visually dense, as if lit by medieval fires, and comprise a realm that feels subterranean if not dungeon-like. Bellocchio culls his narrative from cerebral scenes on politics, religion and the commodified world which are meant to serve up revelation, but these seem more like a hungover stumble through a hall of mirrors. The story, however, is not without its memorable moments: Ernesto shows his son the proper way to make the sign of the cross; the boy talks to God as if the Lord were an annoying imaginary friend; and in one lingering scene, we hear the voice of Ernesto’s mother (who does not sound as loveless as Ernesto has portrayed her to be). There is also the photo shoot in which the sainted woman’s death is re-enacted. Her son Egidio stabs her in the heart while she effortlessly maintains her saintly glow.

Bellocchio is an expert at veiling his agendas, and his premise is not anti-papal agitprop so much as a character study of a man’s gloomy reckoning of his past with his present. Still, the vision remains murky and is burdened by a large cast of characters, none of whom we are able to take a real look at — not even Ernesto — in this too-shadowy drama that doesn’t quite exert enough verve to transform its abstract ideas into art.