Perhaps the greatest merit of Matteo Garrone’s Tale of Tales is its lack of attempt to ever really explain itself, with regards both to its magic and its morality. In terms of its magic, when it occurs, which it does with great frequency, it occurs simply because the magic is extant in the world, like a driving force of nature. It is the logic of the fairy tale that this is so. Seers and witches, ogres and sea monsters and giant fleas come and go simply as pivot points upon which the stories may turn. Magic happens because it gives the stories shape and dynamism and for no other reason than that these stories exist in the realm of “Once upon a time…” As long as the story works structurally, there need be no other justification for random magic.

Like the true fairy tales, though, these are not Disney-fied candies; they are dark matter, indeed, often frightening in their surface monstrosities and disturbing in their psychological significations of human nature. And yet, through their overt grotesqueries, the conglomeration of these tales construct a kind of carnival humor; an amoral bacchanalia that is liberating in its subservience to the id. As with its magic, Tale of Tales never seems to feel the need to explain itself morally. The good and the heroic are punished on par with the wicked and the selfish. Some people win, other people lose, but it is by chance rather than by the just determinations of a moral universe. The only lesson to be learned is that for every action there is a reaction. One cannot help but to admit the equalizing and humbling effect of this consideration.

Adding to the carnival tone of the film, there is throughout an exquisite visual sensibility and, it has to be said, some of the coolest looking monsters to be seen on screen since Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth. These alone make the film worth watching. But Garrone proves as adept at handling fairy tales as he is at handling the more realistic criminality of Gomorrah. He shows a keen understanding of the nature of the material that is sorely lacking in other films of this ilk; it is an understanding that is as subversive as it is narratively traditional and it is a true pleasure to behold.