“The Catholic School” is a story ripped from recent Italian history, the story of a heartless kidnapping, rape and murder in an age when Italian law did not consider rape a crime against a woman, but rather against the public morals.

The Dark Age in which the Circeo Massacre, as they dubbed it in the press, took place preceded even the Amanda Knox case in giving Italian “justice” a black eye, but at least prompted something resembling a little soul searching about who they were as a culture and the sorts of sons they were raising.

Stefano Mordini’s serious-minded film, based on a novelized memoir account of the case by a classmate of the perpetrators, is a clumsy attempt to “explain” these boys in a Leopold & Loeb way, to recreate the La vita privilegiata these rich monsters grew up in and the school that “produced” them.

Their classmate at San Leone Magno School, Edoardo (Emanuele Maria Di Stefano) is our narrator, and takes us into this world of “virtually limitless freedom,” of bullying, money, and sexism taken to savage extremes, practically ticking off the “contributing factors” that led to this “violent time” (in Italian with subtitles, or dubbed) in an Italy that must have produced these kids.

One classmate’s professor-father comes out of the closet and moves out of the family home. The priest and coach of the swim team is spotted picking up prostitutes. One kid’s same-sex attraction hints at masochistic tendencies, another’s worship of his pal’s sister abruptly bears fruit. One student is having an affair with the actress mother of a classmate. One particularly brutish kid’s rich father buys his way out of trouble right up to the moment a body and a surviving victim are found.

There are devout Catholics in their ranks, a tragedy preceding the tragic “event,” a hunting trip, a ritualized initiations into secret societies, parties and pickups and sex and boys with “fascist tendencies” writing essays in admiration of Adolf Hitler and not taking it well when their deep thoughts aren’t appreciated.

None of this is that original or affecting, and NONE of it “explains” “How we groomed a pack of rich monsters.”

We’re treated to a sort of “Rules of the Game” take on how the rich kids lived and learned back then, cossetted in a bubble of money and class, and then jarringly hurled into a graphic depiction of the preparations and the commitment of the crime.

Director and co-writer Mordini makes a total hash of things by battering the timeline into atoms, constantly skipping from “three months before the event” to “130 hours” before back to “two months before,” and on and on.

I kind of get what he was going for. But this is so ham-fisted you wish some woman exec in the production had given Mordini a good bawling out over the lack of sensitivity, whatever accuracy he was going for with the crime, for the women in the story.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, nudity, alcohol abuse

Cast: Emanuele Maria Di Stefano, Giulio Pranno, Benedetta Porcaroli, Federica Torchetti, Alessandro Cantalini, Francesco Cavallo, Leonardo Ragazzini, and Valeria Golino

Credits: Directed by Stefano Mordini, scripted by Luca Infascelli, Massimo Gaudioso and Stefano Mordini, based on the book by Edoardo Albinati. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:46