Servants review – evil permeates a Catholic seminary
As if in a succession of scenes from a starkly remembered bad dream, this deeply disturbing film in haunting monochrome, from director Ivan Ostrochovský and co-writer Marek Lescák, tells the story of two students in a Catholic seminary in early-80s Czechoslovakia, part of the (real life) Pacem in Terris organisation, a collaborationist body through which the church submitted to state control in return for the right to (notional) existence.
Juraj (Samuel Skyva) and Michal (Samuel Polakovič) are fresh-faced boys who arrive at the seminary to find themselves in an austere haunted house of shame, reeking of paranoia, exhaustion and self-reproach. Dissident young priests are secretly communicating with the Vatican and with Radio Free Europe and the priestly authorities have neither the courage to endorse this defiance nor the ruthlessness to suppress it, and so the secret police are making their malign presence felt – in the form of “Dr Ivan”, who has a blackmailing hold on one of the senior clerics. He is a deeply malevolent man with a skin disorder, played by Vlad Ivanov, another in this actor’s gallery of odious east European authority figures.
There are some amazing visual compositions, chiefly some repeated overhead shots of a central basementlevel courtyard, accessible via a flight of stone steps, in which washing is hung up and whispered plotting takes place: it is a rectangle of strangeness, like an Escher drawing. And all the time the security police are getting ready to remove undesirable persons, perhaps through the fiction of a military “draft” or through simple murder.
Pure evil permeates this brief, 80minute film, whose cold visual brilliance reminds me of the recent movies of Paweł Pawlikowski. It wasn’t until some time after it had finished that I grasped one of the reasons it was so oppressive: there are no women in it at all. There is a chill of political fear.
• Servants is released on 14 May on digital platforms.