Jeanne (Lou de Laâge) travels from France to Sicily to reunite with her beloved Giuseppe. But upon arriving, Jeanne finds Giuseppe mysteriously absent. She is met instead by his mother Anna (Juliette Binoche), who does not regard Jeanne’s unexpected visit as a pleasant surprise.

Worried, Jeanne makes numerous desperate calls to Giuseppe that go unanswered. Her uncertainty is compounded by Anna’s mercurial moods and oddly affected disengagement about Giuseppe’s absence. Slowly, Jeanne and Anna find in each other a meaningful camaraderie while waiting for the truth about Giuseppe to surface.

This enormously impressive feature debut from Piero Messina (who acted as assistant director on Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty) portrays Sicily as a magical, enigmatic place filled with natural beauty and dark secrets. Messina’s bold evocation of his birthplace—home to one central character; an exotic foreign land to another—sets the tone for a gorgeously photographed travelogue-drama that champions the emboldening power of human emotions in a world fraught with grief. —Andres Castillo