Money isn’t everything, and the world is ending. Both of these quite jarring sentiments tumble awkwardly out of the patriarch of a honey-farming family under the gaze of hot stage lights and judgemental eyes in the climactic scenes of Alice Rohrwacher’s The Wonders. The film takes an extended, intimate look at this family’s life, spent in near-complete seclusion in central Italy. Gelsomina, the eldest daughter at 12 years old,  acts as her father’s right-hand beekeeper and custodian to her many younger sisters as she faces growing up and reaching beyond this tiny, detached world of which she is an integral part. The family’s isolated nature, their spoken jumble of Italian, German, and French, and their striking oddness makes their farmhouse seem like an island kingdom, barely resisting the pull of the world growing around it.

Over the course of the film, which took home the Grand Prix at Cannes last year, the family faces the trials of keeping their independent honey business afloat, fending off the looming threat of government intervention into their private, ramshackle lives, as well as taking on a young offender as an assistant. By far the biggest upset to this contained world comes with the arrival of of an apparently angelic figure (played by Monica Bellucci, of all people) who turns out to be the host of an obscenely tacky agricultural gameshow. A spellbound Gelsomina, determined to get her family’s honey on television, drags them into a world of kitschy, false sincerity and “authentic” rural cuisine, hastening the family’s seemingly inevitable indoctrination into the wider world.

The tone constantly veers between comedy and drama, capturing the harsh realities of a family living on the breadline with remarkable honesty, but never succumbing to melancholy or despair. The whole cast deserves recognition for playing a part in the exuberant, idyllic chaos that the family generates, from the cantankerous father, to the anarchic youngest, to Gelsomina herself as the single sane fulcrum point the rest swirl about. At its best moments, the film is absolutely hilarious, without ever feeling like it was trying to be. It’s a strange, offbeat, and at times apparently aimless journey into the obscure world of Italian beekeeping, but The Wonders is peppered with enough golden moments of humour and sheer surreal brilliance to make the experience worthwhile.