Critic Reviews

This is a blistering drama, intense, disturbing and inescapably thought-provoking, a film that gets its power from a merging of potent opposites.

What ensues in Corpus Christi, Jan Komasa’s absorbing and spiritually attuned drama, turns out to be a fascinating exercise in fake-it-till-you-make-it, with a hefty dose of fatalism and small-town hypocrisy thrown in for maximum provocation.

A quite interesting and irresistible movie, a sort of cross between Paul Schrader’s recent film of spiritual crisis, “First Reformed,” and Steven Spielberg’s “Catch Me If You Can.” An impostor as anguished priest.

It’s a film that engages with the dour without becoming bitter, and a film that allows for redemption but only through the hardest possible work. It’s a film that’s built on a lie but sees only the underlying truth. What an astounding religious drama, and what a beautifully realistic morality play.

Bielenia's damp-eyed performance is the broken heart of this restrained and low-key narrative.

I found the entire enterprise a touching, rough-hewn delight, never sparing us the explicit sex and violence of Daniel’s life “before,” moist-eyed in seeing how his “outside the collar” thinking is a tonic for a tortured town that needs to move on.

Director Jan Komasa’s film — nominated this year for the international-feature Oscar — may feel a tad slow at times, but Bielenia is never less than totally compelling.

The film is an important one, but above all, it is an exceptionally pleasing and easy one to watch despite its density. This is partly due to Bartosz’s fantastic performance showing great acting range by going through a whole spectrum of emotions very convincingly and subtly.

Often moving but also disquieting and even intermittently funny, this drama unfurls a spiritual parable that is uniquely Polish but accessible to all.

Bielenia captures a vivid sense of the emotions that Daniel experiences from the alertness of a trapped animal at the offenders institution to the euphoria that seems to surge through him after the delivery of a rousing sermon. His committed performance and Komasa’s assured storytelling convince us that God can work in mysterious ways.