In 2013, the young Italian perfumer Filippo Sorcinelli, who has also made glittering robes for two Popes, launched his fragrance house, UNUM, with a signature scent. The perfume, Lavs, is a concentrated version of the one he made to spritz on the papal garments before they were delivered to the Vatican’s inner sancta. A vérité nod to the halls of St. Peter’s—full of resin and incense and myrrh—it is also a bit too operatic to be subtle. Lenny Belardo, the fictional American Pope at the center of Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino’s new HBO series, “The Young Pope,” would be disgusted by the existence of such a fragrance. Played with a malevolent flatness by Jude Law, Lenny may have come into power at only forty-seven, but he has no interest in Vatican novelties, flashy promotional campaigns, or building the papacy’s social-media channels. Instead, he emerges from the conclave as an arch conservative (his choice of the name Pius XIII places him in a lineage of extreme orthodoxy), a Pope who not only refuses to be photographed but also obscures himself completely from his public. No travelling abroad, no glad-handing the press. He appears to the masses from his balcony only in shadow (for the first five episodes, at least); in depriving them of his lovely visage, his public must feel the searching, lonesome quality of grasping for faith in the dark. Early in the series, Lenny gives a smirking speech to the Vatican’s plucky marketing manager about his plan to follow in the footsteps of Banksy, Salinger, and Daft Punk, rather than those of his pontifical forebears; he intends to be the Pope without a face, because he knows that there is nothing more alluring than that which we cannot have.

“The Young Pope” is, at its core, a show about the construction of faith, both on a macro-level (the historical spectacle and grandiosity of the Vatican, and Lenny’s complex relationship to it) and an individual one (how each person builds a scaffolding of belief around his or her life). This is familiar territory for Sorrentino, who wrote and directed all ten episodes, and whose Oscar-winning film “The Great Beauty” was a parable about the construction of the self: the film followed a bon-vivant Roman journalist, Jep, nearing his twilight years, who wonders whether the identity he has claimed for himself (debauched, excessive, the life of the party) is simply a means to mask his deepest pain. The subject of faith swoops in at the end of that film, as Jep is tasked with interviewing an ancient nun on the verge of sainthood. As Jep takes a boat to the lighthouse where he had his happiest moment as a young man, Sorrentino shows the nun crawling up the Scala Santa stairs on her hands and knees, bloody and battered by her mission.

Sorrentino presents a murkier vision of faith in “The Young Pope,” using woozy and disorienting dream sequences in order to question Lenny’s version of reality, not to mention his belief in God. The pilot begins with not one but two dreams in a row. In the first shot of the series, we see Lenny crawl into St. Mark’s Square, in Venice, on his hands and knees, out of a pile of infants.* We know that this scene is surreal and impossible, and, as Lenny wakes with a start, the viewer is in on the joke. We see Lenny rise, dress in his sacred attire (with a gratuitous shot of Law’s bare butt—a nod to the freedoms of premium cable), and proceed through a swooning crowd of nuns and cardinals as he prepares to deliver his first homily to the faithful from the balcony. Sorrentino shoots this scene as a striking, painterly tableau through marble corridors. As Lenny steps in front of the throng, the clouds part and the sun emerges. The sudden weather change looks like a miracle, a confirmation of his divinity. Then he starts to speak about the joys of masturbation, and the cardinals rush to depose him. Just as they are about to pull him offstage with a hook, Lenny wakes in a cold sweat again.

His nightmares are nothing compared to the havoc he wreaks in reality. We learn that Lenny’s appointment was the result of a compromise: Cardinal Voiello, the Vatican Secretary of State, played with doddering humor (and a gigantic artificial facial mole) by Silvio Orlando, swayed the conclave to choose the young Pope because he believed that Lenny would be a malleable puppet. When he proves to be anything but, the cardinals are thrown behind the same smoke screen that Sorrentino places before the viewer. Sorrentino wants the viewer to feel as unsettled and muddled watching this new Pope as his Vatican colleagues do. Sorrentino’s Vatican resembles Versailles, and Lenny’s behavior channels the petulant Roi Soleil. Later, he demands that his maternal figure only refer to him as “Your Holiness”; he makes high-ranking cardinals perform minuscule personal tasks; he rebukes a kindly old cook who offers to make him pasta fagiole by telling her that friendly relationships are poisonous, a snipe that brings her to tears.

In his cruelty, Lenny channels other Bad Men of cable: Tony Soprano, Frank Underwood, Walter White. But Lenny’s despotic machinations are complicated by the fact that he might very well also be a saint, albeit one with a nefarious moral code. Via a series of gauzy flashbacks fit for an after-school special, we learn that, as a child, he was abandoned by his parents at an orphanage. The woman who raised him—Sister Mary (Diane Keaton), who later becomes his papal consigliere and public mouthpiece—believes that he healed a dying woman from sickness. In the second episode, we see the possibility that Lenny can perform miracles with our own eyes: he charms a kicking and braying kangaroo, which arrived at the Vatican as a gift, and frees it into the papal gardens. Later, when he meets the kangaroo in the gardens at night, the two stare at each other as if in sanctified understanding. He also helps a barren woman to procreate by praying for divine intervention. We believe that he has some sort of magical power. But he also confesses to more than one confidant that his own belief in God is on shaky ground. Sorrentino powerfully wields his ability to confuse; we never know if Lenny is truly doubtful or performing his doubt for cynical ends.

The entire show is so campy that it draws attention to its own bravura performativity—Sorrentino drapes Law in glamorous excess: crisp white gowns with golden details, a statement garden hat with a brim made for boating, cherry-red leather shoes, an ivory tracksuit that is the finest sacred leisurewear Rome has to offer, and the papal tiara, a conical silver adornment that stands at least a foot high. In one montage, Lenny dresses in pounds of vestments to the sounds of LMFAO’s “Sexy and I Know It.” But any fun that might be gained through this visual humor is undercut by Lenny’s icy misanthropy; the show is pleasing to the eye but not to the soul. Sorrentino’s odd cocktail of sombre Machiavellian drama and Cinecittà-inflected flamboyance proves confusing enough to make the viewer question her own comprehension. And perhaps this is deliberate: his swirling, oversaturated visuals mimic the feeling of watching someone powerful and unpredictable change his persona in every scene he’s in. Sometimes, Belardo is charming, and even vulnerable, moments before threatening individuals with total ruin. The buzz around the show, which included a viral meme in which people replaced pop-song lyrics with now stale jokes about the Pope being so very, very young, suggested that the star would be a libertine; the trailers prepared viewers for the saga of a religious roué who smokes and drinks and sets fire to convention, and maybe even has carnal relations (spoiler: he doesn’t). But the character we meet in the series is far more sinister. This is a Pope who is nothing more than a metaphor to himself, who demands in turn that the Pope be a symbol of terrifying absence to everyone else: a man without essence. In the end, that may be the most potent kind of selfhood, because it is so destabilizing to everyone who comes into its orbit. This is a man in sumptuous robes with nothing of substance underneath; beautiful to look at, but as ephemeral and menacing as smoke.

*An earlier version of this sentence misidentified the location of the first shot.