'The Innocents' Movie Review

There is a film you have probably never heard of. It premiered at Sundance in January 2016, picked up four César nominations at the 2017 ceremony, sits at 95 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and almost nobody talks about it. Partly that's because of what it's about. Partly it's because the cast speaks French and Polish in roughly equal measure, and most of them are nuns.

Stay with this. The Innocents (released in some countries as Agnus Dei) is one of the strangest, most carefully made films of the last decade.

A True Story Hardly Anyone Tells

Anne Fontaine sets the film in Warsaw in December 1945. The war is officially over. The Soviets are the new occupiers. A young French Red Cross doctor named Mathilde Beaulieu is treating French soldiers still scattered across Poland when a Polish nun shows up at her aid station, in the snow, asking for help. Mathilde follows her to a Benedictine convent, where she finds a sister in advanced labour. Then another. Then several.

The whole thing comes from the real diaries of Madeleine Pauliac, a French Resistance fighter and Red Cross doctor who actually did this work in 1945. The original idea came from Pauliac's nephew, Philippe Maynial, who held onto her unpublished notes. Producers Éric and Nicolas Altmayer brought it to Fontaine over lunch. She had already directed Coco Before Chanel and Gemma Bovery, films about charismatic women in well-lit rooms. This was something else entirely.

Why You Should Watch It

If you have seen Pawel Pawlikowski's Ida (the 2013 Polish drama about a young novice) and wished it had gone further into the bodies of its women, The Innocents is the next step. They share a country, a faith, a winter, and an actress. Agata Kulesza, who played Aunt Wanda in Ida, is the Mother Superior here.

Where Ida is restrained, The Innocents sits inside the silence. Fontaine films the convent like a place where speaking would crack something. The pace is slow on purpose. You can feel the cold. You can feel the women not telling each other things. Then a baby cries somewhere in the building and the whole house has to react.

If you like films where the camera hangs back and lets faces do the work, this is for you.

The Camera Is Doing Its Own Praying

This was shot by Caroline Champetier, who also shot Xavier Beauvois's Of Gods and Men (2010). She knows her way around a film about religious people. The palette is mostly blacks, whites, and brownish greys, with one warm light source somewhere near the centre of the frame. A candle. A lamp. The white of a habit.

The cinematography earned a César nomination, the film's fourth. Champetier has talked about the radiance of skin, its transparency, as something she keeps reaching for. You can see it. Faces in this film are lit like they matter.

Standout Performances

Lou de Laâge, who plays Mathilde, holds the film. She is in nearly every scene. The character is an atheist, raised by communists, dropped into a building of women whose entire worldview she has no interest in. She doesn't soften and she doesn't harden. She just keeps doing the medicine.

Agata Buzek, as Sister Maria, is the one who speaks French and becomes Mathilde's bridge into the convent. Sister Maria is the wisest woman in the building and not a virgin when she took her vows, so she carries the trauma differently from the younger sisters. Buzek plays it without ever underlining it. You just see it.

Kulesza, as the Mother Superior, gets the hardest part. The Abbess is short-sighted, cruel, and trying to hold an institution together with both hands. Kulesza refuses to make her sympathetic. The film is better for it.

Where It Falters

There is a third-act turn involving the Mother Superior that some viewers find pushes the film closer to melodrama than it has earned. It is the one moment where the restraint that defines the rest of the film cracks, and your reaction to that crack will decide how the ending lands.

Vincent Macaigne's character, Samuel, the Jewish doctor who joins Mathilde at the convent, is also a bit underwritten. He is meant to be a counterweight to all this Catholic suffering, and Macaigne is excellent in his scenes, but he drifts in and out without ever quite belonging to the place. The film is so disciplined about its women that the man feels imported.

Behind The Scenes

A few things worth knowing.

Fontaine spent time living in French nunneries before shooting. She wanted to know how nuns moved around each other, how they passed plates, how silence got divided up. The Vatican later screened the film and told her it felt true to religious life.

She found her location, the convent, abandoned and rotting in a forest in Poland's Warmia region. The structure was there, she has said, but no inside. They built it from the façade in. Principal photography began on January 13, 2015, and lasted seven weeks.

The Polish actresses sing the Latin chants live in the film. There is no playback. Fontaine doesn't speak Polish, so during scenes she could only direct gesture, breath, and what she could see on the actresses' faces. The cast had to trust her without language. They did.

Things To Look Out For

Watch the light. Champetier almost always lights from one source, and that source is almost always something fragile. A candle that could go out. A doorway that could close.

Watch Sister Maria's hands when she meets Mathilde. Buzek does something with her fingers that is very quietly the whole film.

Listen for the line "Faith is 24 hours of doubt and one minute of hope." It came up in the Norwegian Andreas Award citation when the film was honoured there, and it is the kind of line you remember weeks after watching.

And listen for the Max Richter cue at the end. Fontaine wanted Richter to do the whole score, but his schedule didn't allow it, so she got him for the closing minutes only. It is one of the most earned uses of his music in any film of the last ten years.

This is not a film you put on with dinner. But on a cold night, with attention, The Innocents gives you back something rare.