Hal Kitchen
Between Cabrini, Immaculate and The First Omen, 2024 is oddly shaping up to be the year of the nun in cinema. Mother Vera, surprise winner of the London Film Festival’s prize for best documentary, is of course, a very different type of film from any of those mainstream successes. It’s closest kin in narrative film is definitely Ida, Pawel Pawlikowski’s Oscar-winning portrait of postwar Europe through the eyes of a novitiate nun confronting the truth of what happened to her family in the war. Like that film Mother Vera is shot predominantly in black and white, following Olga, a nun at a Belarusian convent as she questions her vocation and slowly reveals the mystery of her own unhappy past. It is contemporary, but the setting, combined with the aesthetic choices that one usually associates with period pieces like Ida make it easy to forget you’re not watching a historical drama.
Ogla’s character study is a documentary but the level of candid access provided to her life makes it feel very much like a scripted slice-of-life drama at times. The film follows her through her daily chores, her attendance of services and community care work with the local community of ex-convicts and her visits home to her family. It is partly through these interactions but mostly through her confessional voice-over that we learn the circumstances that led her to take her vows. Love, betrayal, imprisonment, addiction, and serious health problems all strew her path to the church, and as the film goes on, the sense grows that her journey is far from over. Throughout we begin to see the film’s most prominent theme emerge, the idea of freedom. A priest defines being free as “to have God in one’s heart”, but is that truly what it means to be free? Olga became a nun to be liberated from desire, dependency, guilt and sin, but has she not merely traded them for the oppression of responsibility, suffering, rules and institutional pressure, sacrificing the right to express herself?
As a nun her chief responsibility lies in caring for the convent’s horses, and it is here that Olga finds the closest thing to freedom. Bonding with the animals and riding through the snow, she is able to do these things for the love of doing them and isn’t that what freedom actually means? These are wholesome scenes in which the film finds the closest expression of spirituality. If there is a God, it is in the eyes of animals that we see them. Animals were used similarly in The Outrun, which also explored a recovering addict’s journey towards redemption in a forbidding natural landscape. In comparison to that film’s narrative, Mother Vera is barren, the fly on the wall sequences of convent life and Ogla’s daily chores are ultimately less than captivating. The stark visuals of snow-covered countryside filmed in luminous black and white are attractive enough but with such languorous pacing and Ogla’s internal conflict remaining entirely unspoken, Mother Vera can be a less than magnetic watch. One’s sympathies would have to run pretty deep to consider it truly compelling from start to finish, and it would be generous to say that its ideas were fully fleshed out. Olga’s voice-over—the primary source of narration throughout the film—is mostly restricted to her recounting what happened to her and not how she responded to it or how it led her into the arms of the church.
The contemplative tone of Mother Vera might not be a total turn off for some, it charmed enough viewers to win the festival’s Best Feature Documentary prize after all, and it did work on me somewhat. However, I don’t think it’s an experience that will stick with me in comparison to richer films on similar topics. For as much time as we spend with Olga—she’s onscreen for the majority of the film’s runtime—she remains a fairly distant figure in the cold landscape.
