A mountain village where nobody ever seems to suffer becomes the setting for The Holy Boy, a 2025 Italian-Slovenian production from director Paolo Strippoli that blends drama, horror and thriller into one unsettling whole. Streaming on K-Time with Persian dubbing and subtitles, it follows what happens once an outsider starts asking why the calm never breaks.
What is The Holy Boy about?
A physical education teacher relocates to an isolated village high in the mountains, drawn by reports of a community living in near-total peace. The serenity turns out to have a source: once a week, residents gather around a solitary boy said to have been born with the power to lift a person's pain simply by holding them close. What looks like devotion from a distance reveals itself, on closer inspection, as something far more troubling — a private ritual the village depends on and protects. As the teacher tries to pull the boy free of the arrangement, his own intentions curdle, and the rescue he imagines starts to look like another form of the same hunger the village has been hiding all along.
About the cast
Michele Riondino takes the lead as the teacher at the center of the story, working opposite Giulio Feltri, Paolo Pierobon, Romana Maggiora Vergano, Roberto Citran, Sergio Romano, Anna Bellato and Sandra Toffolatti, who fill out the village and the wider cast of people caught up in its arrangement. Between them the ensemble carries both the outsider's growing unease and the community's guarded calm, letting the film move between quiet domestic scenes and its darker undercurrent without tipping too far into either register.
Context & significance
The Holy Boy is an Italian-Slovenian co-production that leans on folk-horror instincts more than jump scares, using an isolated setting and a tightly kept communal secret to build dread gradually. Running 122 minutes, director Paolo Strippoli gives the village itself as much weight as any single character, treating its rituals and its silence as the real engine of the story.
Watching The Holy Boy on Ktime
The Holy Boy streams in full on K-Time with both Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles available, so viewers can choose whichever fits how they watch. This page is free to read; watching the film itself requires a K-Time account login, and the platform's Farsi-first design is built for browsing a catalogue exactly this way.