Portraying saintliness will not be a hagiographic directive, fortunately, in “Mom,” Macedonian director Teona Strugar Mitevska’s narrative of seven essential days within the lifetime of a 37-year-old Mom Teresa. Undue reverence was a cost levied in opposition to William Riead’s “The Letters,” the final main narrative fiction concerning the globally beloved Albanian-born Catholic nun who was granted sainthood practically 20 years after she handed in 1997, a delay Mitevska’s feminist Teresa, a half century earlier, would have deemed unsurprisingly late. As she tells off a cherished male ally in an early scene, the world is run by “males, males, and males.”
Nevertheless, resulting from uneven writing (Mitevska co-wrote the script with Goce Smilevski and Elma Tagaragic) that also does properly to be concretely based on interviews Mitevska performed greater than 15 years in the past for an unreleased documentary “Teresa and I,” “Mom” is on a mission that, its daring stylistic thrives however, isn’t finally forceful or persuasive. In nice half it is because the inner turmoil that we’re led to imagine the central characters harbor don’t all the time inform the interpersonal confessions of which audiences can infer on their very own. What does come by way of is Noomi Rapace’s accessible interpretation of Teresa, with a punk rock alter-ego — if not a dragon tattoo — that delights even whether it is discordant, and her charged, platonic but intimate relationship with Sister Agnieszka, performed by Dutch actor Sylvia Hoek (“Blade Runner 2049”) who excels in shouldering the burden of the movie’s dramatic thrust.
Seven chapters in descending order construction the film’s story as a countdown of hiccups, indignations, and even a hallucination, a day every in a pivotal week that can decide Teresa’s future. When the movie opens, Teresa has been the Mom Superior of the Calcutta chapter of the Sisters of Loreto congregation since a decade earlier however feels she has outgrown her usefulness to the four-century-old establishment. She is anxiously ready to listen to again from the Vatican relating to her utility to begin her personal order, a privilege hardly ever granted to girls.
It has been a yr since India’s independence from the British, however to Mom, the struggling was equally immense earlier than or after the nation acquired its tumultuous nationhood. Essentially the most susceptible — ravenous youngsters, individuals troubled with leprosy, and pregnant girls with out the remotest chance of healthcare — all the time wanted tending to; that colonial actuality was intact. In reality, Mom feels she will be able to save hundreds of thousands of extra lives if solely the Vatican acknowledged her plan.
Credit score to the filmmaker that she doesn’t indulge within the poverty porn which many rightfully accuse different standard movies by white administrators set in India ( you, “Slumdog Millionaire”). Mitevska does conform although to the favored creativeness of the acute devotion exhibited by Saint Teresa in the direction of the downtrodden. In a single visceral scene of complicated dignity, Mom removes maggots from a dwelling man’s rotting flesh. The macro twentieth century Western rhetoric about Catholic charity can absolutely be critiqued for not partaking with the driving ideological position of caste, however that isn’t the curiosity of nor the purview of this movie.
As an alternative, a poignant battle between the 2 nuns is. Mom’s turbulent self-examination is incited by the revelation of Sister Agnieszka’s being pregnant within the movie’s first Act. We’ve barely registered Agnieszka as a significant character till then, simply the trace that she is Mom’s chosen successor (her “primary”) ought to the Vatican honor her plea. Of their first scene, there’s playful banter as they transfer furnishings and debate the advantage of not being hooked up to areas and objects, whilst Mom casually confides in Sister that she “misplaced a toddler immediately.”
Later, as the 2 mull over a handwritten structure of finest practices, which embrace carrying easy cotton and visiting household as soon as each 10 years, emergencies be damned, Sister is compelled to share her secret. In an occasion of the movie’s many calculated if stirring framing decisions, Mitevska and DP Virginie Saint Martin cowl half the body fully with the again of Mom’s black veil, permitting us to deal with Hoeks’ face as she utters the phrase “pregnant.” Rapace’s response externalizes 4 totally different beats, from a snort to a tear, astonishment to anger. The movie’s docufiction-like honesty is probably the most conspicuous right here: to think about that the Mom Teresa whom the world is aware of largely as a faultless octogenarian may need as a youthful girl had comparable intense moments of utmost conflicting feelings is humanizing, and wonderful. Right here not less than, we’re ready to know and really feel each girls’s ache.
Regardless of this construct up in Chapters Seven and Six, the remaining 5 chapters don’t all the time enable us to understand the warring impulses between the ladies. Sister confronts Mom about figuring out what it means to fall in love; using a illustration of a female depiction of God to cowl Sister’s face comes throughout extra as a compelled visible system than as a personality’s perception that earthly love can method the divine. A eating room scene which Sister vigorously enters whereas in some type of trance doesn’t appear to jostle the opposite sisters who usually are not aware of the blasphemous state of affairs. A number of heated discussions on abortion, which needs to be fascinating as clues to the state of the talk within the 40s, really feel didactic. Notably, one later sequence, set jubilantly to “Arduous Rock Hallelujah” and which Mitevska closely adorns with surrealism, is jarringly sudden as a result of there’s little proof that Mom’s dialectic with Sister would engender the unconventional doubt posited inside Mom.
Thus a variety of the narrative believability of the primary characters’ dilemmas doesn’t all the time land. Against this, Mom’s exchanges with Father Friedrich (Nikola Ristanovski), the movie’s key supporting character, usually work, as a result of they seem to own the sibling-like affection that Mom insists to a rumor mongering older nun they’ve. Additionally admirable are different craft parts, notably the digicam motion in two inside rotundas to seize the characters spiraling; the lighting of somber dough making scenes; and using songs of religion in the direction of solemn worldbuilding, like when the Sisters reduce the hair of lachrymose inductees. As cinematic tapestry, Mitevska’s cloistered movie does really feel reduce from the material of Calcutta in 1948 and from the Catholic missionary work one attributes to that point.
One may argue that for a movie concerning the cataclysms within the corridors of religion, there’s few leaps of transcendence in “Mom.” Nevertheless, the movie isn’t primarily about that. Mitevska needs to inform a story about two girls who attempt to discover frequent floor, even friendship, regardless of being on totally different paths. Mitevska additionally refuses to sanctify Mom Teresa greater than essential, as a substitute portraying her as a strict disciplinarian who believed in organizational practicality as a lot as within the inherent holiness of kids. As for transcendence, there’s a set of scenes when one character unexpectedly adorns crimson whereas one other traces of blue. Not fairly catharsis however a change in face of what we laypeople would name trauma. Minor transformations akin to these assist canonize a grounded if pretty flawed drama.
Grade: B-
“Mom” opened the Orrizonti part on the 2025 Venice Movie Pageant. It’s at present in search of U.S. distribution.
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