The opening shots of I'm Not Scared are transcendentally beautiful; they depict children, laughing and running through endless fields of wheat that shimmer like gold and undulate across the hilly Italian landscape, while an onobstructed expanse of blue spreads out over everything above. A classical strings piece plays on the soundtrack, as beautiful as the pictures on screen but elegaic in tone; from years of filmgoing experience, we can intuit that the juxtaposition of film and music means that the happiness of these images will not last, and that these children will soon reach that unfortunate point where they learn that not all is well in the world and that they, too, must grow up.

There is another moment in the film that suggests this, in which 10 year old Michele (Giuseppe Cristiano) sees giant reapers rolling over the hills, harvesting the wheat; the director, Gabriele Salvatores, cuts from close-ups of the rotating blades to shots of the doomed crickets clinging to the stems and then to the saddned face of Michele, whose world, it seems, is being obliterated for no good reason.

The beauty of this film is that it ends before Michele learns that reason, or any other; for its entire duration maintains the innocent perspective of a child -- a child who, at ten, is still young enough to play with his younger sister and get excited by toy cars and cry in his mother's arms. When he uncovers the terrible secret that drives the plot, he reacts as a child would, with curiosity and optimism that manages to embolden us, the audience, who know enough to be shocked and disturbed by the disovery.

What that discovery is had to do with a deep pit on an abandoned farm; it is the focal point of the marketing campaign, which posits the movie as a thriller, or perhaps even a horror film (I myself went in expecting something along the lines of Guillermo Del Toro's The Devil's Backbone). At first, that seems to be the case, and there are some early moments that are designed to elicit screams from the audience. Before too long, however, the terror is defused and replaced by sadness -- although that sadness is all ours and not Michele's.

That is the key to the film's success: we recognize things or put things together because our grown-up sensibilities allow us to, but the film never does the work for us. Its vantage point remains firm and resolute with Michele, and as he plumbs the darker depths of adulthood, we marvel -- and perhaps reminisice -- over the infallible and rather wondrous optimism of children, for whom fear is often overtaken by curiosity; when you're that age, parents are always there to save you from anything that is truly bad; they're rocks of clear and definite stability whose shakiness only becomes apparent with age.

Michele does eventually discover his own parents' fallibility, and we sense that, if the film were to continue after its last scene, he would grow up very quickly. For this reason, I wouldn't recommend the film to impressionable children, who might otherwise find it exciting, but I would certainly urge their parents to see it. It is, of course, a beautifully made film, a well-told tale and a thrilling mystery; but like Peter Pan from a few months back, its insight into that bridge between childhood and growing up is clear, and invaluable.