Severe both in tone and form, this German drama focuses on a teenager (Lea van Acken) on the eve of her Confirmation. She tries to reconcile her contemporary adolescent experience with the strict, Second Vatican Council-rejecting Catholic sect in which her family, including her sternly overwrought mother (Franziska Weisz), has raised her. The story is presented in fourteen clearly delineated chapters. Each corresponds to a station of the cross ("Simon of Cyrene helps Jesus to carry his cross," "Jesus is nailed to the cross," etc.), and each is presented as a single shot with a fixed angle. It becomes a type of plot point or thematic gesture the few times there is a pan, so still is the camera and so exact is the framing. People are destined to debate the pain-to-gain ratio when assessing a cinematic experience as barbed and ascetic as this, but I found it to be a fascinating indictment of scolding authoritarianism masquerading as piety, and the key actresses deliver heartrending, tough performances in a film whose rigorous aesthetic provides them almost no place to hide.

A-

You watch more German-language films than I do.