970x125
Some movies arrive sanded down and shrink wrapped, every corner rounded off by a studio so you never catch your hand on anything. The Forbidden Lands is not one of those movies. Mattia De Pascali’s Italian feature (original title Le Terre Incolte) feels handmade in the way a wood carving feels handmade, the tool marks still in it, a little crooked, a little cursed around the edges. I watched it, I liked it, and I am about to spend several paragraphs being honest about why that came with conditions.
The setup is lean enough that I can hand it to you without spoiling much. A poor village in Southern Italy, woods that keep swallowing people, and two strangers who show up claiming to speak for the Lord. Most of the town decides these men are the answer to their prayers. One woman is less convinced, and she goes looking, with a wild young girl and a so-called witch for company. That is the door. I am not going to walk you all the way through what is behind it.
The Village Does Its Own Haunting
The best thing here is the place, and De Pascali knows it. He sets the film in a Southern Italy that reads like the dirt-poor 1950s by way of an old comic book, no castles, no clean medieval cosplay, just sun and stone and people who have been afraid for a long time. The landscape is the special effect. When the atmosphere is working, which is often, you can feel the heat and the hunger and the way superstition fills the space where help should be.
That rural unease is the spine of the whole thing. Fear here is not a jump scare, it is a condition the village lives in, and the movie is patient enough to let that sit on you.
When the Men of God Arrive
The film gets sharpest the moment the two messengers start running the room. There is real menace in watching frightened people hand their judgment to anyone who promises deliverance, and the picture understands that a community ready to be saved is a community ready to do something terrible. The religious dread does not feel borrowed from other movies. It feels local, like it grew out of the same soil as the crops.
When the holy men and their armed enforcement step forward, the tone tilts toward the macabre, with a few bursts of splatter that have a homemade, slightly gleeful quality. Fabrizio Pugliese as the Hermit, Fabrizio La Monica as the Knight, and Ivan Raganato as Fiacrio give the authority-and-outsider side of the film texture, and Nik Manzi and Alessandro Stajano fill out a village that genuinely behaves like one organism losing its nerve.
The Women Who Stop Waiting
The heart of it is three women who decide nobody is coming. Denise Cimino as Selvaggia and Paola Medici as Rosa do the quiet, grounding work that keeps a strange film emotionally legible, the kind of acting that does not announce itself. Donatella Reverchon brings the Witch a real presence, the figure the town fears and the figure the town probably needs, and she gives the part a weight the movie leans on.
I came out of it most fond of the fact that the rescue mission belongs to the people a place like this would normally throw away. A mother, a feral girl, an accused witch. That is a satisfying engine for a folk tale, and the film lets the women carry it without turning them into a slogan.
Where the Seams Show
Now the conditions. This is a small, independent production and the budget is visible. Some staging is modest, some moments that should land like a hammer land more like a firm tap, and a larger production would have given a few of these scenes the muscle they are reaching for. The pacing wobbles. De Pascali is a maximalist by instinct, always adding another idea, and that generosity is charming until the film is carrying more than its legs can comfortably move.
The bigger ask is the tone. The Forbidden Lands shifts between rural horror, religious nightmare, dark fantasy, and outright fairy-tale adventure, sometimes inside the same stretch, and not every gear change is smooth. If you need a movie to pick a lane and stay in it, this one is going to keep drifting across the lines on you. None of this reads to me as a failure of imagination. It reads as the natural cost of a tiny crew swinging at something much bigger than its resources, and I would rather watch that than another competent film that wants nothing.
So About That 2.5
2.5/5 sounds harsher than I mean it here. This is not a bad film. It is a limited, uneven, genuinely interesting one. The number is me being honest that the budget shows and the execution is rocky, not me waving the thing off.
Because here is the part the score cannot hold, this has a personality, and personality is the rarest thing in low-budget horror. I will take a scrappy movie with a self-contained little world and a point of view over a polished one with neither, every single time. For the right viewer, the 2.5 is a green light, not a warning.
Verdict
The Forbidden Lands will not work for everyone, and it is not trying to. It is too odd, too modest, and too committed to its own little mythic wilderness for that. But if you like regional horror, scrappy dark fantasy, and movies that feel like they crawled out of a local legend instead of a content calendar, there is something here worth following into the woods.
It premiered in Galatina in October 2025 and has been picking up festival mileage since, including an Honorable Mention at the Washington Underground Film Festival and a Best Horror nomination at the Los Angeles Fantasy Fest, plus screenings at Bakunawa Fest in the Philippines and Underground Cinema in Ireland. It runs about an hour and thirty-eight minutes in Italian, with English and Spanish subtitles. Go in expecting handmade, not slick, and meet it where it lives.
Rating: 2.5/5
The Forbidden Lands is available worldwide on Prime Video and Relay.
