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The sense of foreboding is unpalatable in the D’Innocenzos brothers Bad Tales. The wait for why there is such a festering malaise in this unnamed suburb of Rome that the film is set in is intoxicating but eventually becomes quite frustrating, as the film draws near to its 98 minute close.

We are witness to unsavoury events throughout that flag why a lot of the child characters are non-vocal around the adults, but we are also left starved of further depth as to why things continue to happen the way they do. In overplaying the subtle, unspoken card, the D’Innocenzos miss delivering some crucial conclusions and leave other sub plots dangling without consequence. On the other hand, it could be argued that what is left to the imagination is more potent than anything depicted on screen, which is why reviewing Bad Tales feels like a troubling conundrum too – it is subjective in the extreme.

At a surprise party for his daughter, a randy Italian homeowner studies a neighbor’s wife through the sliding glass door and describes all the ways he’d like to violate her. In the bathroom, his 14-year-old son sits with his best friend, studying the hardcore porn sites listed in the browsing history of Dad’s cellphone. A few days earlier and a couple doors down, a pregnant teen senses the prepubescent kid’s sexual curiosity and taunts him with a series of increasingly provocative acts. For example, when he offers her a cookie, she exposes a breast and gives a whole new meaning to “Got milk?”

Innocence is not a concept to be found in the D’Innocenzo Brothers’ cinematic oeuvre, which consists of two films so far: “Boys Cry” and “Bad Tales,” both of which forgo the notion of childhood as a state of uncorrupted naivete. Rather, in the Italian siblings’ deeply cynically,...