At the heart of Alice Rohrwacher’s brilliant, enigmatic fable is a single mysterious event. As the illegal sharecropper community where he has lived all his life is being broken up by the police, Lazzaro – endlessly obliging and sweet-natured, a holy fool if ever there was one – falls from a towering cliff, apparently to his death. A wolf strolls into the picture and sniffs at the prone body; Lazzaro, like his near namesake Lazarus, revives, as the voiceover tells us the wolf has smelled something new: “It was the smell … of a good man.” Even more strange: it’s now 30 years on. Lazzaro is, to all appearances, identical, while everyone he knows is now decades older.

This transformation is central to Rohrwacher’s film, which is preoccupied with primitive religion, sainthood and pre-Christian superstition. The opening half is extraordinary enough: Lazzaro is part of a group of poverty-stricken workers living on a tobacco-farming estate called Inviolata (a name with unavoidably Marian overtones). They live hand to mouth, in squalid conditions – patronised by the estate manager and fearful of the local aristocrat in her mansion on the hill. Squint a little and this could be the 1930s. But of course, as we eventually realise, this is the modern day, and these hapless paisans have been brainwashed into living a feudal life outlawed decades ago.

Lazzaro’s besotted admiration of the aristocrat’s son Tancredi (who jokes that they could be half-brothers, a throwaway comment Lazzaro takes fatefully seriously) is the trigger for what follows. The law descends on Inviolata after Tancredi enlists Lazzaro’s help to stage a fake kidnapping; the sharecroppers are scattered, the mansion abandoned, Lazzaro falls.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest One kind of oppression to another ... Tommaso Ragno and Adriano Tardiolo in Happy As Lazzaro. Photograph: Simona Pampallona

The second half is, if anything, even stranger. Lazzaro makes his way to the nearby city, where forests of mobile phone masts lurk just out of sight of Inviolata. The former inhabitants have regrouped and essentially returned to their hand-to-mouth lifestyles. Lazzaro is heralded as a saint; his reappearance considered a miracle. A real miracle may actually be happening when music follows Lazzaro down the street after he and his companions are turned away from a church.

So what does it all amount to? The film does not yield its meanings easily, but I think Lazzaro’s state of grace is the key to it all. As society passes from one kind of oppression to another – from the pastoral to the agricultural to the industrial age – an unreflecting faith is its inevitable counterpoint. Is Happy As Lazzaro telling us that we must love one another or die? Or that religion is keeping us all enslaved? I’m not entirely sure, but Rohrwacher has made an amazing, bewitching film. Can’t wait for the next one.