Stations of the Cross

A carefully composed parable of religious fanaticism, Stations of the Cross is the story of Maria, a 14-year-old girl struggling with the strictures of her traditionalist Catholic faith. Maria’s familial church rejects the Vatican II reforms and demands from its young adherents extreme forms of piety and self-denial, bordering on asceticism. Sensitive and well-meaning Maria must also contend with her domineering mother, whose cruelties and admonitions complicate her daughter’s attempts to reconcile such extraordinary spiritual requirements with the more quotidian concerns of public high school and adolescence. Organized in chapters following the titular path of Christ to his crucifixion, this formally inventive film unfolds as a series of austere and extraordinarily vivid fixed shots, weighing matters of faith, adolescent yearnings and the potential danger of early religious indoctrination. The aesthetic pleasures of such restraint—only rarely interrupted by camera movement—underscore the perils of a belief system that venerates suffering, sacrifice and martyrdom through repression and control. —Paul Meyers