Novitiate

Cathleen grows up in a house without religion; on a scholarship at a Catholic school she is gripped by the silence and the order, and enters a convent at seventeen. The training is hard: bans on speech, sessions of self-accusation, physical penance. At the same time the decisions of the Second Vatican Council begin to be applied and the whole order of the convent is declared void. The subject is not faith but what happens to a life bound to rules when the rules change. The Reverend Mother cannot accept that the method she has applied for forty years has been declared wrong overnight; the young sisters are shaken not because they have been freed but because they do not know what to do. The form is enclosed and quiet: corridors, cells, candles. There is little dialogue and the scenes are left long. It is Margaret Betts' first feature and she wrote it herself, speaking to women who had lived in convents while preparing. It screened at Sundance in 2017 and took a directing award. That tens of thousands of nuns in America left their orders after the Council is a matter of record, and the film looks straight at that period. Margaret Qualley plays Cathleen, Melissa Leo the Reverend Mother and Julianne Nicholson her mother. Who it is for: viewers who like closed-institution drama and narratives built on belief. Who it is not for: anyone wanting pace; the film is deliberately still and some passages feel repetitive.