A Holy Week Watchlist
Egg-cellent movies to prep for Easter
This week marks the start of Holy Week, a preparatory period in the Christian faith’s annual remembrance of Jesus’ crucifixion on Good Friday and resurrection on Easter. As someone who was raised not to be a “Creaster” (only showing up to church on Christmas and Easter), I’ve found this period in my chosen faith tradition a valuable period of reflection and contemplation. In religion as in life, you don’t get to the celebration without grappling with the pains of life and the reality of death.
I think this holds across any number of beliefs — it’s a common theme running across many of the films about Judaism that I curated in a very early post for this newsletter.
Why that is cannot be summed up any better than by Gen X’s great sage David Foster Wallace. This quote has been rattling around in my head since I read it again in a devotional shared by the church I grew up in earlier this month:
“In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship … is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly … Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.”
Religion has always attempted to make sense out of the senseless and find meaning in the meaningless. Film helps with that, too, as it allows us to consider a world beyond our own that both precedes us and extends beyond us. So whether you’re grappling with the difficulties of the real world through the lens of Christianity or some other prism, I do believe these ten reel visions of religion (5 classical, 5 contemporary) have something to offer you.
CLASSIC
Black Narcissus, Max and Criterion Channel
If you have the chance to see Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus on a big screen someday, please take the opportunity, as it skyrocketed in my estimation last year following a screening at MoMA. This tale of Catholic nuns trying to make a seed bloom in hostile soil — AKA, plant a church-based school and hospital deep in the mountains of India — runs into countless setbacks. Some come from the hostilities and suspicions of the locals on whom they attempt to push their religion. But there’s something psychological and intangible that also starts to grip the nuns themselves, and it ultimately manifests in ways that would not feel unwelcome inside a horror film. The spirit may be willing, but the sisters’ flesh is weak. (This would make a great double bill with Martin Scorsese’s Silence.)
Léon Morin, Priest, Criterion Channel
The original hot priest, accept no substitutes. (Sorry, Andrew Scott.) Jean-Pierre Melville knew exactly what he was doing by casting French New Wave hearthrob Jean-Paul Belmondo as the titular character of Léon Morin, Priest. This Catholic curate during the Nazi occupation of France is not like other priests; he’s a cool priest, progressive and open-minded about the faith. It’s enough to draw in Emmanuelle Riva’s Barny, a WWII-era widow and religious none just trying to get by in the dire conditions. Léon provides a source of succor in trying times, and the soundness of his religious advice is never in doubt. Yet there’s always a slight sensual charge undergirding their encounters that Melville milks gloriously for all the tension he can get. Beyond just being some kind of schoolgirl fantasy, it raises valid questions about whether worldly attraction for a person can serve as a valid entry point into a faith tradition.
The Mission, Tubi (free with ads)
When people went gaga for The Mission, my reaction was always a very Michael Bluth-esque “Her?” Watching a movie for extra credit in 10th grade while packed tightly into a gym does it no favors. But when
picked it as the movie that corresponded with Maundy Thursday in her book Films for All Seasons, I knew it was time to revisit. (Ahem, ahem, click below to read more.)
Her discussion questions around this story of a Jesuit missionary who manages to create a stable Christian community among an indigenous South American population draw attention to the church in action vs. the church as an institution. “Historically the church’s institutional track record has been to either capitulate to those [worldly and materialistic] instincts or be destroyed by them, sometimes both at once,” she writes. “Not exactly an uplifting note.” Yet The Mission offers more than just bleakness as it depicts the travails of two priests played by Jeremy Irons and Robert De Niro, different in their approaches to religious fidelity but united in their passionate defense of God’s people. It’s a call to contemplation about what it means to live and interpret one’s sacred calling — even, and especially, when it intersects with empirical and colonial power.
The Passion of Joan of Arc, Max and Criterion Channel
This is what the close-up shot was made for, as I argued in my senior honors thesis (conveniently available in video essay format). Carl Theodor Dreyer fixates on the face of actress Maria Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc to bring us into the immediacy of her agony and anguish while facing trial from Catholic clergymen for alleged heresy. It makes the martyrdom of France’s patron saint feel immediate and visceral, not buried in mothballs. If you haven’t seen the original film that every filmmaker worth their salt has been trying to rip off for a century (including, I argued, Christopher Nolan in Oppenheimer during the trial scene), now’s the time.
Winter Light, Criterion Channel
If you were a fan of Paul Schrader’s First Reformed, which should have gotten Ethan Hawke a Best Actor nomination in 2018 (he lost to R*mi M*lek for Bohemian Rhapsody), then you should be legally required to watch Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light. It’s a direct inspiration for Schrader to the point where “homage” begins to feel too soft a word for the contemporization of this story about a priest grappling with his inadequacy in a dying congregation. I have no memory of writing this piece comparing Winter Light to God the Son in Bergman’s “Silence of God” trilogy, but I was pleasantly surprised that I didn’t hate what I’d written in 2018 when someone tagged me in it on Twitter1 recently. An excerpt is below:
“Bergman confronts the idea that there might be something worse than facing the brunt of God’s wrath — the notion that He doesn’t exist at all, leaving a moral vacuum in the universe that will be filled by those with the sheer will to rise to power through brutality and oppression.”
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If you’re enjoying this, you might also want to read last year’s deep dive into spirituality and Scorsese.
CONTEMPORARY
Chronicles of a Wandering Saint, available to rent from various digital platforms
There’s a line from my favorite hymn that without fail brings me to tears every year on All Saints’ Day: “They live not only in ages past / There are hundreds of thousands still […] For the saints of God are just folk like me / And I mean to be one, too.” In a world where science has filled many gaps in human knowledge, it can feel like the concept of a “miracle” belongs to a less educated and skeptical era. But Chronicles of a Wandering Saint earnestly posits that a saint — or some kind of angelic force — might still walk among us. Sweet old church lady Rita (Mónica Villa) mulls over staging a divine intervention in contemporary Argentina, reasoning that the ends of bringing people into the faithful fold justify her deceitful means. Writer-director Tomás Gómez Bustillo takes her journey toward the light into very different territory in its back half, pivoting into unforeseen and inventive comic territory that’s a wild but wonderful swing from its more mild-mannered dramatic opening. Nonetheless, this charming indie is both beatific and beautiful in its demonstration of mercy both by and toward Rita.
Disco, free with ads on Fandango at Home
The Norwegian drama Disco really stood out to me at TIFF 2019, and I wish it hadn’t been unceremoniously dumped onto streaming during the pandemic. As I wrote out of that festival for Crooked Marquee:
“On the one hand, there’s an evangelical congregation blasting Jesus jams in a contemporary service, serving fancy lattes in their lobby, and preaching a hollow prosperity gospel that makes Christianity sound easy. On the other, there’s a more conservative congregation that presents congregants with the trappings of a more traditional service yet masks a dark underbelly of mysticism. Caught somewhere in the middle is Josefine Frida Pettersen’s character, the 19-year-old dancer Mirjam […]
She’s grappling with the fallout from physical fallibility that keeps her from performing at the top of her craft. Such listlessness sends her looking for comfort and answers in religion, and Mirjam finds neither in the congregation headed by her stepfather. While she seeks grace and clarity, all he offers is judgment and critique.
[… The] film presents a compelling case that religious institutions are failing people by gravitating toward extremes and abandoning a sensible center based in basic scriptural principles.”
Misericordia, now playing in select theaters
Don’t say you weren’t warned. If this headline makes you skittish, then perhaps Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia (now making the theatrical rounds) isn’t for you. But those who can stomach some risqué elements will find a Highsmith-ian film willing to grapple with some of the toughest questions of contemporary morality. “We’re all responsible for the carnage, and we all know it,” posits a morally equivocating Catholic priest to the film’s unstable and potentially dangerous protagonist, Jérémie. When the tortured man posits that other deaths to which he was not tied feel farther away, the priest offers back: “Are you sure that makes much difference?” Guiraudie challenges the audience to decrypt this impromptu sermon from the priest and weigh any morsel of truth against his other misdeeds. I asked the filmmaker if he saw the film as a parable, and he gave me a fascinating reply:
“There’s something in this film where I was questioning something contemporary to us. I’m trying to question what I find to be a certain value system in place, where I feel that we have lost the capacity to be moved by the grief, sorrows, and miseries of others. It’s true that, in finding that, I’ve returned to my Christian roots, to some degree, because I find the fundamental precepts of Christianity are good…or at least I would think so, in the way that I hold them. Doubtlessly, while making the film, I was also thinking a lot about Gaza and the Palestinians who were being bombarded with nowhere to go.”
Novitiate, available to rent from various digital platforms
The reforms instituted by the council known as Vatican II are widely credited with bringing the Catholic Church into the present day and helping it survive as a modern institution. But those changes were not without their discontents, as the 2017 period drama Novitiate demonstrates. Though set in the 1960s, the conflicts still feel entirely relevant as conjured by Maggie Betts. The film’s entry point is a young nun, Margaret Qualley’s Cathleen, as she enters a convent for stability amidst a turbulent family life. But her Mother Superior, rendered firmly but fairly by Melissa Leo, slowly becomes the center of gravity in the film — or perhaps it’s more accurate to say she’s a black hole sucking everyone else toward her. The resistance she puts up to implementing the orders forces deliberation about who gets left behind when the sacred bends to the secular, as well as what happens to those who access their faith through rituals that others deem archaic or outdated.
The Starling Girl, available to rent from various digital platforms
As I wrote in 2023 when I ranked The Starling Girl my #9 film of the year, “I’m a sucker for dramas about people wrestling with individual faith in the context of an institutional religious community, and Laurel Parmet’s coming-of-age drama is about as peerless as they come. The film provides a compelling look not only at the tortured journey faced by Eliza Scanlen’s titular teen but also at an extended network of the fellow faithful, most notably Lewis Pullman’s tricky turn as the flirtatious youth minister who has some growing up of his own to do.”
I’ll have a special newsletter for paid subscribers on this film later this week, featuring interviews with Parmet, Scanlen, and Pullman. Make sure you get it in your inbox!
It’s going to be a big week of new releases that I’ve reviewed! Check out The Ballad of Wallis Island (expanding nationwide), The Legend of Ochi (opening NY/LA before expanding nationwide 4/25), and The Wedding Banquet. All are exceedingly lovely watches worth enjoying with just about anyone in your life. (And for the real sickos, there’s also The Ugly Stepsister — Cinderella meets The Substance, if The Substance were good. I said what I said.)
I also scored an interview with the legendary horror director David Cronenberg ahead of his late-period triumph The Shrouds, which opens in limited release this weekend. I think if you read to the end of our conversation on Slant Magazine, you’ll find some very interesting parallels with the topic of this newsletter.
You can keep track of all the freelance writing I’ve done this year through this list on Letterboxd.
You can always keep up with my film-watching in real-time on the app Letterboxd. I’ve also compiled every movie I’ve ever recommended through this newsletter via a list on the platform as well.
I’m not sure I’ve ever heard Bill Murray sit for a long-form interview, so this was a fascinating listen.
Michael Wolff, author of — 2018 resistance trigger warning — Fire and Fury, returns with another barn burner. This time, at New York Magazine, he’s profiled the infamous David Zaslav. It’s worth your time, I promise.
Back to you later this week.
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall
I will deadname X if I want, thank you very much.