Portraying saintliness is not a hagiographic directive, thankfully, in “Mother,” Macedonian director Teona Strugar Mitevska’s narrative of seven crucial days in the life of a 37-year-old Mother Teresa. Undue reverence was a charge levied against William Riead’s “The Letters,” the last major narrative fiction about the globally beloved Albanian-born Catholic nun who was granted sainthood nearly two decades after she passed in 1997, a delay Mitevska’s feminist Teresa, a half century earlier, would have deemed unsurprisingly late. As she tells off a cherished male ally in an early scene, the world is run by “men, men, and men.”
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However, due to uneven writing (Mitevska co-wrote the script with Goce Smilevski and Elma Tagaragic) that still does well to be concretely founded on interviews Mitevska conducted more than 15 years ago for an unreleased documentary “Teresa and I,” “Mother” is on a mission that, its bold stylistic flourishes notwithstanding, isn’t ultimately forceful or persuasive. In great part this is because the internal turmoil that we are led to believe the central characters harbor don’t always inform the interpersonal confessions of which audiences can infer on their own. What does come through is Noomi Rapace’s accessible interpretation of Teresa, with a punk rock alter-ego — if not a dragon tattoo — that delights even if it is discordant, and her charged, platonic yet intimate relationship with Sister Agnieszka, played by Dutch actor Sylvia Hoek (“Blade Runner 2049”) who excels in shouldering the burden of the film’s dramatic thrust.
Seven chapters in descending order structure the movie’s story as a countdown of hiccups, indignations, and even a hallucination, a day each in a pivotal week that will determine Teresa’s destiny. When the film opens, Teresa has been the Mother Superior of the Calcutta chapter of the Sisters of Loreto congregation since a decade earlier but feels she has outgrown her usefulness to the four-century-old institution. She is anxiously waiting to hear back from the Vatican regarding her application to start her own order, a privilege rarely granted to women.
It has been a year since India’s independence from the British, but to Mother, the suffering was equally immense before or after the country received its tumultuous nationhood. The most vulnerable — starving children, people afflicted with leprosy, and pregnant women without the remotest possibility of healthcare — always needed tending to; that colonial reality was intact. In fact, Mother feels she can save millions of more lives if only the Vatican recognized her plan.
Credit to the filmmaker that she does not indulge in the poverty porn which many rightfully accuse other popular films by white directors set in India (looking at you, “Slumdog Millionaire”). Mitevska does conform though to the popular imagination of the extreme devotion exhibited by Saint Teresa towards the downtrodden. In one visceral scene of complex dignity, Mother removes maggots from a living man’s rotting flesh. The macro 20th century Western rhetoric about Catholic charity can surely be critiqued for not engaging with the driving ideological role of caste, but that is not the interest of nor the purview of this film.
Instead, a poignant conflict between the two nuns is. Mother’s turbulent self-examination is incited by the revelation of Sister Agnieszka’s pregnancy in the film’s first Act. We’ve barely registered Agnieszka as a major character until then, just the hint that she is Mother’s chosen successor (her “number one”) should the Vatican honor her plea. In their first scene, there’s playful banter as they move furniture and debate the virtue of not being attached to spaces and objects, even as Mother casually confides in Sister that she “lost a child today.”
Later, as the two mull over a handwritten constitution of best practices, which include wearing simple cotton and visiting family once every 10 years, emergencies be damned, Sister is compelled to share her secret. In an instance of the film’s many calculated if stirring framing choices, Mitevska and DP Virginie Saint Martin cover half the frame entirely with the back of Mother’s black veil, allowing us to focus on Hoeks’ face as she utters the word “pregnant.” Rapace’s response externalizes four different beats, from a snort to a tear, astonishment to anger. The film’s docufiction-like honesty is the most conspicuous here: to imagine that the Mother Teresa whom the world knows mostly as a faultless octogenarian might have as a younger woman had similar intense moments of extreme conflicting emotions is humanizing, and lovely. Here at least, we are in a position to know and feel both women’s pain.
Despite this build up in Chapters Seven and Six, the remaining five chapters don’t always allow us to comprehend the warring impulses between the women. Sister confronts Mother about knowing what it means to fall in love; the use of a representation of a feminine depiction of God to cover Sister’s face comes across more as a forced visual device than as a character’s belief that earthly love can approach the divine. A dining room scene which Sister vigorously enters while in some sort of trance doesn’t seem to jostle the other sisters who are not privy to the blasphemous situation. Several heated discussions on abortion, which should be fascinating as clues to the state of the debate in the 40s, feel didactic. Particularly, one later sequence, set jubilantly to “Hard Rock Hallelujah” and which Mitevska heavily adorns with surrealism, is jarringly sudden because there’s little evidence that Mother’s dialectic with Sister would engender the radical doubt posited within Mother.
Thus a lot of the narrative believability of the main characters’ dilemmas doesn’t always land. By contrast, Mother’s exchanges with Father Friedrich (Nikola Ristanovski), the film’s key supporting character, often work, because they appear to possess the sibling-like affection that Mother insists to a rumor mongering older nun they have. Also admirable are other craft elements, notably the camera movement in two interior rotundas to capture the characters spiraling; the lighting of somber dough making scenes; and the use of songs of faith towards solemn worldbuilding, like when the Sisters cut the hair of lachrymose inductees. As cinematic tapestry, Mitevska’s cloistered film does feel cut from the cloth of Calcutta in 1948 and from the Catholic missionary work one attributes to that time.
One could argue that for a film about the cataclysms in the corridors of faith, there’s few leaps of transcendence in “Mother.” However, the film isn’t primarily about that. Mitevska wants to tell a tale about two women who try to find common ground, even friendship, despite being on different paths. Mitevska also refuses to sanctify Mother Teresa more than necessary, instead portraying her as a strict disciplinarian who believed in organizational practicality as much as in the inherent holiness of children. As for transcendence, there’s a set of scenes when one character unexpectedly adorns red while another lines of blue. Not quite catharsis but a change in face of what we laypeople would call trauma. Minor transformations such as these help canonize a grounded if fairly flawed drama.
Grade: B-
“Mother” opened the Orrizonti section at the 2025 Venice Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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