Monica Bellucci, center, in The Wonders (Oscilloscope Laboratories)

The Italian countryside is no place for a teenage girl, at least not in Alice Rohrwacher’s The Wonders. Young Gelsomina (Maria Alexandra Lungu) lives with her parents and three younger sisters in a run-down farmhouse. Her German father, Wolfgang, insists they live off the grid, confining the family in joyless, hardscrabble bohemianism. Workdays on the land are long. Beekeeping, at least as conducted by the irascible Wolfgang (Sam Louwyck), is dangerous and difficult, and woe betide the daughters if they spill even a drop of precious honey. When Gelsomina stumbles across a video shoot featuring a smiling soubrette gussied up in a ridiculous outfit conceivable only on Italian television, she’s starry-eyed with ideas of a brighter, easier life. The family’s unlikely journey to an appearance on the host’s reality TV show starts out strongly, but the film meanders too freely and becomes too absorbed in its own style to have much impact.

The Wonders is a deeply tactile spectacle. Shot in 16mm, images dwell on rough farmland mud, scuffed walls, the sticky texture of a honeycomb. The camera passes longingly (and endlessly) over Lungu’s usually impassive face, and Dardenne-ish over-the-shoulder shots of the characters aim for a lived-in feel. Director Alice Rohrwacher and cinematographer Hélène Louvart seem lost in the harsh yet sensual world they have created. Perhaps that deep immersion is what won the movie the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2014.

Within this richly evoked atmosphere, the story diffuses into shapelessness. Plotlines roll in and then drift away. The script overemphasizes some themes, such as Gelsomina’s function as a surrogate son to her father. Other developments, like the family’s fostering of a mute young boy (Luis Huilca Logrono), are left untouched, a pity in this case, as this aspect of the family’s life seems potentially moving and Logrono intrigues with a cagey, wordless performance.

Viewers unfamiliar with Italian TV will find the reality show’s climax a surreal and idiotic spectacle, but hey, Italian TV is actually nuttier and sillier than our own. The film spends a long time getting to this point, and the program takes its time in turn to awkwardly play out. An incomprehensible and not believable action by a character, whose relation to the family has never been explained, takes the movie into uncharted territory and toward an ending that is either deliberately unresolved or just confusing.

It feels churlish to harsh on a movie made with craft and no small measure of love. The Wonders contains some charming grace notes. One empathizes with Gelsomina’s yearning for a less grinding existence. Tender, exasperated exchanges between the sisters feel true. Bringing movie star charisma to her role as the TV host, Monica Bellucci has a lovely exchange with Lungu where she seems to be letting the young girl in on a secret. All lovely moments. In this underrealized movie, they just don’t add up to enough.