Awesome Movie

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

This film tells the story of a young woman who enters a convent to be a nun, out of her own volition.Wow, the film may be slow to build up for the finale, but the finale is very profound. I am still rendered speechless and am very saddened by the unintended consequences of the reforms. Having the entire world and the entire reason of existence being invalidated is unimaginable. The film finished for twenty minutes already and I am still having a heavy chest. It is a very profound film.

I am a Catholic Dominican Sister and I watched this film with a mixture of horror and humor, thinking that yet again, a film, even in 2018, has depicted Catholic religious women as totally crazy in oh so many ways. My Sisters watched it and kept interrupting it with questions - "so-they make vows to become novices???? After six months?? And then, perpetual vows at the end of a year and a half of the novitiate? So, Cathleen is 19 and making a life commitment? You have got to be kidding me!!" I was a postulant for one year, a novice (white veil, no vows) for one year- then temporary vows for at least five years, then vowed for life. I was 30. No wonder these kids aren't sure - they are still teenagers!!! No one broke mirrors, no one made us crawl in shame, no one would laugh at a sister with dementia - where do they get this stuff???? Reverend Mother's House of Horrors - was there absolutely no one happy in that Convent - except for the Novice Director, who, of course, left. And no one to replace her to help these young women????And all of those Sisters left because of Vatican II? It had to be no more than a month, at most. They all jumped ship rather quickly! And they left because of Reverend Mother's three minute brutal summary of Vatican II, which actually lasted five years and produced volumes of documents. We studied the Vatican II documents for two years as Novices and Postulants. Mother's talk was enough for many to just pack up and leave??Can no one write a realistic film about a convent that isn't either as silly as Whoopie or as sadomasochistic as this one? Lord, help us!

I was raised in the Catholic Church and was going to a Catholic School at the time of Vatican II and lived through the Vatican II changes. Being only 12 I can distinctly remember the nuns starting to wear every day clothes. This movie is so powerful in what went on within the convents and how the nuns were demoralized by Vatican II. Totally tragic in my eyes.

Novitiate (2017) was written and directed by Margaret Betts. Margaret Qualley portrays Sister Cathleen, who decides to become a nun because of her love for Jesus. She was not raised as a Catholic. In fact, her mother (Julianne Nicholson) considers the decision as a horribly bad move.As the movie progresses, I started to believe that her mother was right. Young women who want to love and serve Jesus are systematically brutalized and humiliated by the Reverend Mother (Melissa Leo). In fact, the Reverend Mother appears consumed by her desire not to allow the young women to think. She also makes it difficult for them to bond with each other. She demands total and absolute obedience from all the women--postulants, novitiates, and nuns.Then, Vatican II ends, and the Catholic church wants to modernize and change. Whether this is good news or bad news for the nuns is an open question in the context of this movie. You'll have to see the movie to learn what happens to Sister Cathleen and the other novitiates. We saw this film at Rochester's excellent Little Theatre, but it will work on the small screen. As I write this review, the movie has a anemic 6.7 IMDb rating. I think it's better than that.