IT is summer, the sweltering Italian summer of 1978, the hottest on record.

The cornfields are ripening, the sheaths dancing in the wind beneath perfect blue skies that stretch out across the horizon like the summer holidays newly begun.

For ten-year-old Michele (Giuseppe Cristiano), this remote southern Italian village scene is the playground for his imagination and the unexpected twists and turns of a rites-of-passage into the harsh adult world

With his father more often absent, and his mother preoccupied, the bright, sensitive and inquisitive Michele fills his days with country matters and the routines of rustic family life.

There are the chores: collecting goods for his mother; there are the duties that go with being the elder child, looking after younger sister Maria and her ever breakable spectacles.

Then there is the joy of travel and discovery: setting off on his bicycle through the fields for adventures with the other village children. Yet even their play has a cruel edge to it, as if blighted adulthood has contaminated them already.

The outsider is the particularly self-absorbed and self-contained Michele, whose curiosity and will to try out new experiences without fear is fuelled by a diet of comic books. One day, he discovers a hole beneath a piece of seemingly discarded tin roofing at an abandoned farmhouse. He expects to see an Aladdin's cave of jewels; instead, as he adjusts to the light, he notices a foot poking from a rug.

What he has found is a terrified boy of his age, Filippo, who has been hidden by kidnappers seeking a ransom. Faced with trying to help a boy bleached and almost blinded by captivity, Michele begins his hastened coming of age in Gabriele Salvatores's vividly filmed, deeply haunting thriller.

Adapted from Niccolo Ammantiti's novel, I'm Not Scared is that classical film construction: a rotten, creeping adult world seen through the eyes of a child, who loses innocence with every new day.

Michele's journey from dazzlingly bright light to Gothic darkness and finally back to light in an almost biblical finale is matched by the intense cinematography (light for the children's world, dark and clandestine for the adults).

Unsentimental yet warmly engaging, lyrical yet earthy, the skilfully constructed I'm Not Scared is anything but child's play.

Updated: 08:29 Friday, June 11, 2004