Vision: From the Life of Hildegard Von Bingen

Although von Trotta seems to regard von Bingen – played with a cool ferocity by Barbara Sukowa – as some sort of medieval feminist precursor, there are enough fault lines in the portrayal to subvert hagiography.

Vision offers a hard-headed view of 12th-century religiosity in which church politics and money conflict with the characters' asceticism. It portrays Hildegard as a passionate humanitarian and a lover of nature.

So it's no surprise that this stately but inert biopic wakes up only when von Bingen becomes less of a singing-nun superstar and more of a human unglued by her own flaws.

Vision is more immediate and immersive when dealing in the jealous attachments among sisters; when circumstance and politics tear Richardis from Hildegard, Sukowa's performance rears to towering heights of abjection.

Although its claims about Hildegard's modernity and relevancy should be taken with a grain of salt, one readily imagines Vision attracting a cross-section of the curious, not limited to feminist cinephiles and true believers.

Von Trotta's film is informative, instructive, intriguing, and polished, yet it finds no ecstasy – religious or otherwise.

Writer-director Von Trotta, an icon of the New German Cinema, doesn't have the technical chops for the fireworks you desire, so she settles for wan earnestness.