Carol Duarte and Josh O’Connor in La Chimera (Neon)

Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera casts a spell. And though the spell beguiles, like all altered states, it can also leave you disoriented, even a little queasy. This very Italian tale moves with the same timelessness and magical realism as the director’s acclaimed 2018 feature Happy as Lazzaro, only grittier and low-key sadder. Wearier too, but aren’t we all?

In her lead character Arthur (Josh O’Connor), Rohrwacher has created a troubled antihero. Diffident and charming as he banters on a train with some unsophisticated local girls, the Englishman, speaking passable Italian, snaps under the ribbing of a vendor and conductor. He also chafes angrily at a homecoming where he is greeted by rambunctious old pals, dressed in tacky 1980s garb and given to loud Three Stooges antics.

Entering a ruined palazzo, Arthur reunites with an elderly widow from his past (Isabella Rossellini) and meets her awkward yet pretty and allegorically named maid Italia (Carol Duarte), a tone-deaf aspiring singer who harbors two secrets and numerous more eccentricities. Arthur settles down on the grounds in a battered shed that evokes the hardscrabble poverty eternally haunting Italian film and life. Everything on the screen seems covered with a layer of deep grime, including Arthur himself—one may recoil at times when the camera dwells on his dirty clothes and red-rimmed, rheumy eyes.

Slowly we reconstruct a memory that stalks this lone wolf and discover what exactly has brought him back to an unpromising place. Now re-upping his membership in his cronies’ antiquities-robbing ring, Arthur is endowed with near-mystical talents at finding buried treasure. He and his seedy pals are ready to hit the ultimate score, robbing tombs for bronzes, statuary, and other chunks of Italian patrimony to sell on the global market.

Rohrwacher leads viewers and Arthur on a picaresque journey through an Italy that seems at once modern and rooted in ancient times, style-checking directors like Federico Fellini with fey carnival interludes and inserting a gaggle of quarrelsome redheaded sisters in a nod to Seven Beauties–era Lina Wertmuller. Gnomic moments arise from encounters with the artistic and mythology-infused treasures the motley crew uncovers. Fortunes rise, then fall. Corruption rears its head. Rohrwacher’s trademark magical realism scenes enchant one minute, try too hard the next. The movie is crammed full of detail, imagination, and moments of wild joy offset by deep sadness.

Perhaps too crammed. At times, one crucial aspect of La Chimera undercuts another one. The director lays on a lot of motley crew hijinks and sometimes coarse satire, and at the same time tries to plead sympathy for Arthur’s tortured emotional life and his wistful will-they-won’t-they attempted romance with Italia. The demands are hand to balance. With all the activity, strangeness, and superstition swirling around him, Arthur stays more or less the same with the possible exception of one daring act. Well, non importa. Perhaps a movie benefits from a certain stillness at its center when it is as sprawling and roaming as this one.