stations of the cross

Maria (Lea van Acken) is a young girl being brought up in the Society of St Paul who struggles to maintain the exacting standards demanded of her by her faith and her aggressively devout mother (Franziska Weisz). This ‘Society’ is a thinly disguised version of the Society of St Pius X, a group that rejects the modernisations of Vatican II and now exists outside of the Catholic Church. It is, to put it mildly, conservative in outlook. Maria and her friends are indoctrinated to believe that they are religious warriors, that the modern world is evil, that their way is not just the best way but the only way, that sacrifices are a necessity and that ascending to Heaven is the ultimate goal of life. Director Dietrich Brügermann is inviting us to consider the parallels with the radicalisation of some young Muslims: the problem is not religion per se, but extremism. There are plenty of religious characters in the film and the vast majority of them are decent, humane people; the rest are extremists who have perverted religious devotion into a death cult. As it moves slowly towards its inevitable conclusion, the film is divided into 14 tableaux to mirror the 14 Stations of the Cross, Jesus’s journey to his place of crucifixion. I use the word tableaux advisedly because each segment consists of one take with no edits and virtually no camera movement. As a piece of film-making, it is remarkable and the demands placed on the cast must have been enormous. An uneasy watch that provokes a sense of despairing anger at the human cost of all this dogma. Daniel king 7/10