The convent is a pressure cooker in this fevered, energetic account of a pivotal week in the life of the young Mother Teresa, which jump-starts the Orizzonti sidebar at this year’s Venice film festival. Macedonian writer-director Teona Strugar Mitevska ticks down the days from seven to one and wrings a performance of flayed, hard-bitten intensity from Noomi Rapace, who marches down the corridors with a face full of fury. Rapace is a long way from her breakout role in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo; tonally, though, not so much. If Mother Teresa never goes so far as to set about the sisters with an axe, the sense that she might injects Mitevska’s film with a pleasing dose of danger.
It is 1948, we’re in the broiling heart of Kolkata and Sister Teresa has tired of her teaching role at the Loreto Entally convent. “I’m a woman in a system run by men,” she complains to sympathetic Father Friedrich (Nikola Ristanovski), although she has also heard a call from the big man upstairs.
Teresa applies to the Vatican for permission to set up her own mission, but the response takes an age, her patience wears thin and she has a more immediate problem. When her heir apparent, Sister Agnieszka (Sylvia Hoeks), admits that she is pregnant, Teresa is duly scandalised. She loves Sister Agnieszka but is repulsed by her, too. “I would never jeopardise my mission for earthly pleasures,” she declares in one of many examples of overly on-the-nose dialogue.
Ahead of the film’s premiere, Rapace billed the film as a “punk-rock” reframing of the 20th-century saint, although the handling is arguably more Euro-metal than punk. There’s plenty of reverb guitar on the soundtrack, culminating in an extended headbanging session as the brides of Christ dance on the convent landing at night. It’s an approach that finally generates more heat than light and leaves Teresa exposed but not necessarily examined.
Teresa, it’s clear, is desperate to strike her own path and tend to the poor and the needy. But are these motives purely altruistic? In the opinion of the writer Christopher Hitchens, this white saviour was not a friend of the poor but of poverty itself, and viewed the slums of Kolkata as a happy hunting ground for impressionable Catholic converts. Mother does little to disabuse us of that view, although its frequent God’s-eye shots of the action leave open the possibility that a higher power is guiding her hand and testing her faith. Teresa treats Agnieszka’s pregnancy as an infuriating distraction, another mess to be cleaned up before she can make her escape. It may, though, be the great moral challenge by which her mission is judged.
Time is running short and Teresa craves an answer. So now she picks up the pace, steamrolling through the convent like a heaven-sent Nurse Ratched. She’s wiping the blood off the sisters’ wimples. She’s plucking maggots out of the body of a wounded beggar, who giggles and masturbates throughout the procedure. Her eyes are glittering; her skin looks as taut as a drum.
Teresa is torn and the film is, too. As the clock ticks down to judgment day, Mother veers on and off the path of righteousness, constantly summoned back to its duties of presenting a faithful, fact-based account of its subject. But it’s at its best and most fun when it plays like a giallo horror movie: the lurid tale of a fanatical nun who’s confused God with Satan and herds her excitable flock right into the flames.