Scherzetto review – Toni Servillo brings gravitas to a dithering Neapolitan ghost story

It’s always good to see the veteran Italian star Toni Servillo at Venice; in fact, the festival is pretty much unthinkable without him. But this initially promising prospect – adapted from a novel by Domenico Starnone – is a minor, quibbling tonal oddity, unsure if it wants to be scary or sentimental. Servillo lends it as much gravitas as he can: his mere presence is valuable ballast and the streetscape scenes of Naples are handled with a connoisseur’s touch by director Mario Martone, whose previous Naples-set movie Nostalgia was far superior.

Daniele (played by Servillo) is a septuagenarian book illustrator whose old-fashioned, hand-drawn artistry is something he testily treasures. He has come back to his family home in Naples, to the gloomy apartment where he was brought up, just behind the train station, and where his grownup daughter Betta (Serena Rossi) now lives with her husband and their five-year-old son Mario (newcomer Lorenzo Perrotta), who is adorable and as bright as a button, but also borderline insufferable.

Daniele has agreed to babysit little Mario while Betta and her husband go off on a much-needed restorative weekend break. Daniele thinks that he can use this time to work on his new project while Mario quietly reads or colours. He is working on illustrations for a new edition of Henry James’s ghost story The Jolly Corner – which the film perhaps partly echoes in mood. But impish Mario won’t keep quiet and Daniele has problems of his own. He suspects that his drawings have become too dark, too gloomy: his initial work for the James story has already been rejected on this basis. And annoyingly, little Mario has artlessly pointed out that his illustrations for a new edition of The Odyssey are very dark, something Daniele at first suspected was a problem in the print.

Left alone with the kid and his doubts, Daniele starts brooding on the ghosts of the past: all the family members with whom he once had to share this little flat – although their “ghost” apparitions are neither satisfactorily scary nor dramatically informative. We never really get a full sense of their relationships. Most of all, Daniele’s ancient boyhood dread of the flat’s little balcony has been reawakened, a tiny, vertiginous ledge over a chilling “void” below – and a problem with the door handle means it is very easy to get trapped out there.

And so the film continues, weirdly toggling between the uncanny and the sweetly sentimental – although the tougher, more wised-up sense of the city itself comes across with Daniele and Mario’s walks through the streets. It’s a baffling misfire.