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Nov 24, 2018Nursebob rated this title 4.5 out of 5 stars
Supposedly based on an actual incident, Anne Fontaine’s searing drama pits belief in Divine Goodness against a world wracked with ugliness and she does so without the hollow sermons so common in today’s “faith-based” melodramas. Filmed against a wintry backdrop of bitter snowfields and leaden skies—pierced now and again by glowing candles or a sober Latin chant—Fontaine doesn’t insult her audience with heavenly metaphors, what shafts of sunlight course through the convent walls are wholly earthbound while the young doctor herself remains a steadfast atheist (her lover a fellow doctor and disillusioned Jew who’s still mourning the relatives he lost to the Nazis and their Polish collaborators). Between the polar extremes of Abbess and Physician however lie the nuns themselves and it is their reaction to the horrors they underwent which gives the film its bite. As some cling tenaciously to whatever comfort their faith has left to offer, others begin to question their calling, and a few begin to question God himself…and all the while the babies keep being born. As Mathilde, Lou de Laâge embodies secular pragmatism with just a touch of that naïveté which comes with youth while Agata Kulesza, in the role of Mother Superior, plays a conflicted soul so bound by the demands of her office that she’s lost touch with why she took her vows in the first place. And bridging the two is Agata Buzek as Sister Maria, a woman who turned her back on the earthly temptations she once knew only to have them come back to haunt her in her most vulnerable moments. A brilliant ensemble piece sure to impress believers and non-believers alike.