It is very rare that a movie trusts a viewer to draw his own conclusions about the characters and events in a movie. The ones that do, if they're any good at all, are among the best of their kind. This movie presents its characters as we would meet them in life, without the manipulative cues that normally clue you in on how you are supposed to feel (musical score, camera angles, establishing shots). You are not even sure at first who the main characters are; you have to - God help you - work at discovering what is going on. The theme of the movie is unfamiliar: it is about the weird symbiosis between sexuality and religious passion that is manifest in the title character. The film's characters are unglamorous, their motives obscure, the setting of the movie is mundane, the incidents of the plot are unsensational, the pace is slow and the ending is ambiguous. Sounds like fun, right? The odd thing is that it is continuously absorbing. It is the most life-like movie I have seen for years.
Review of The Holy Girl
