The Venerable W.

“Evil” is one of those tricky words usually best avoided, since its quasi-mythological sense of moral absolutism tends to downplay the human agency involved. Yet as Barbet Schroeder well knows, there are times when no other term properly conveys the insidious nature of intolerance and carnage robed in the trappings of power.

It’s the shocking disjunct between his religion and the rabid nationalism of his sermons, writings and declarations that powers Schroeder’s conventional but nevertheless effective long hard stare into the eyes of intolerance.

Those who believe that all Buddhists respect their religion's core principles of peace and tolerance should take a look at The Venerable W (Le Venerable W), director Barbet Schroeder’s eye-opening chronicle of one Burmese monk’s long campaign of racism and violence against his country’s minority Muslim population.

Schroeder’s approach is calm, almost detached, in keeping with his other work (although the choice of de Medeiros to speak for Buddhism, and with a nonspecific Asian-seeming accent at that, struck me as an avoidable misstep); this makes the bleakness of what he recounts (which is buttressed by an insinuatingly menacing score by Jorge Arriagada) that much more resonant.

The Venerable W does not explicitly debate the existence of evil as such, but it certainly argues that nationalism, ignorance, arrogance, dogmatic religion and fear are its constituent elements. This is a sombre, pessimistic but necessary film.

The Venerable W. is at times downright dowdy, but there’s an ever-present sense of rage and despair burbling beneath its placid surface.