'Padre Pio' (2023) Review

A schizophrenic story structure disrupts a truly profound meditation on suffering and meaning.

“Suffering in union with Christ is a door to heaven. Suffering lived alone is a door to hell.”

Going into this film, I was unsure what exactly I was going to get.

Was I going to get a profound spiritual biography of one of the greatest mystics of the twentieth century, a movie so good that it inspired its star, Shia LeBeouf, to convert to Catholicism?

Or was I going to get a socialist screed from aging leftist Abel Ferrara, a director whose first film was hardcore pornography and is best known for his stylishly grimy 80s and 90s crime flicks?

Padre Pio turned out to be both.

The film follows two concurrent storylines. The first is the eponymous Pio, a young Franciscan friar recently transferred to a new friary in the small town of San Giovanni Rotondo who is going through a Dark Night of the Soul spiritual experience. He experiences great suffering and temptations from the devil, while at the same time feeling completely abandoned by God. As he struggles through this test of faith, he must reaffirm the faith of others through prayer, spiritual counsel, and the sacraments.

The second storyline follows a group of peasants in San Giovanni Rotondo as they join Italy’s nascent socialist movement and attempt to win an election against the wealthy landowners whom they feel are exploiting them. Soldiers returning from the horror of World War I are torn between supporting the nation for which they sacrificed so much and the people who are suffering under this oppressive regime.

These two storylines never intersect. Padre Pio never meets the socialists, with the exception of a brief bilocation experience when he visits the body of a dead peasant. The socialists never seem to darken the doors of a church, even though they keep traditional Catholic imagery in their homes, with a picture of Christ the King next to Karl Marx. Their stories never merge into one narrative, and so Padre Pio feels like two different movies intercut between each other, rather than one cohesive film.

One of these two films is clearly much better than the other. The socialist storyline meanders, never really picking up steam. Their goal, the local election, arrives and they win, but the landowners claim the votes were fraudulent and bar the socialists from taking office. A confused riot turns into a bloodbath as the police fire on the angry socialists, killing most of the main characters of this portion of the movie. Their struggle was in vain; evil and oppression triumphs. It felt much more like a present-day political statement than any picture of 1920s Italian politics. I was very annoyed that Ferrara was dragging 2017 boomer politics into my Padre Pio film; it definitely had Robert de Niro shouting “F*** Trump!” energy about it. If I want a movie about how, if we’re not careful, fascism could rise again!, I’ll go watch 2022’s Amsterdam, thank you very much.

The mediocrity of that half of the film is so frustrating because the other half is really, really good. This is perhaps the best portrayal of spiritual struggle and faith through suffering that I have ever seen on film. Shia LeBeouf is electric as Padre Pio, thoroughly embodying the struggle, the faith, and the authority of this great saint at this crucial point in his life. The imagery of temptation was strong and effective, and Pio’s feeling of utter desolation as he cried out to God for help was raw and devastating.

But even as he suffers, even as he cannot see the greater picture, even as he feels angry and abandoned by God, he still trusts that God is there to guide him. Pio tells one of his penitents a story about watching his mother embroidering a piece of cloth. From Pio’s vantage point on the floor, looking at the backside of her work, it was a tangled mess of knots and string. It looked horrible, like there was no design or purpose to it. He reproached his mother for creating such an ugly thing, but then she flipped it over and showed him the beautiful design that only she could see. Pio knows and trusts that God’s plan is at work in everything. As brutish and empty as all our suffering in this world seems, God is there and will turn it into beauty. We must cling to our faith, even when the night seems darkest and God seems furthest away.

The end of the film validates Pio’s faith. He unites his suffering with Christ, begging that his body might be a scapegoat for the sins of the entire world. And in the last shot of the film, Christ himself comes down from the Crucifix in front of which Pio is praying and places his pierced hand on Pio’s shoulder. As Pio raises his own hand to touch Christ’s, we see Christ’s wounds have been transferred to Pio. Pio has embraced the suffering of Christ, and Christ has ended his time of desolation. This is the only true door to heaven.

This ending of hope and redemption is in stark contrast to the almost nihilistic ending of the socialist storyline. I would almost say that Ferrara was trying to portray the ultimate futility of political utopias, pointing towards Christ as the only way to true fulfillment, except that he treats the socialists more hagiographically than he treats Pio himself. By splicing in this seemingly unrelated story, Ferrara undermines whatever message he was trying to deliver and muddles the ultimate point of the story he was trying to tell. Out of the 104 minutes of this films runtime, we have perhaps 45 minutes of a truly great Padre Pio movie, and the rest is confusing.

This movie led to Shia LeBeouf’s conversion, and his portrayal of Padre Pio is spectacular. For those two reasons, I’m inclined to like the movie more than I didn’t. However, it could have been much stronger had it stuck to Pio’s spiritual journey and left the politics out of it.

Parental Advisory: This movie is not for the faint of heart. Its themes of suffering and spiritual desolation alone will disturb children and people who are sensitive to such topics. Pio’s temptations are unsettling, true to the historical accounts we have of his encounters with Satan. Beyond these aspects, there are occasionally instances of cursing, mostly from Satan or the socialists but Pio himself cusses out the devil pretty strongly at one point. There is a brief scene in one of Pio’s temptations with a fully nude woman, who blasphemously licks a portrait of the Blessed Virgin in a lewd manner. There is graphic bloody violence at the climax of the socialist plotline during the riot. I would not recommend showing this to anyone under 18, and even adults should be aware of how heavy the movie can be before watching it.