The convent is a pressure cooker in this fevered, energetic account of a pivotal week in the life of the young Mother Teresa, which jump-starts the Orizzonti sidebar at this year’s Venice film festival. Macedonian writer-director Teona Strugar Mitevska ticks down the days from seven to one and wrings a performance of flayed, hard-bitten intensity from Noomi Rapace, who marches down the corridors with a face full of fury. Rapace is a long way from her breakout role in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo; tonally, though, not so much. If Mother Teresa never goes so far as to set about the sisters with an axe, the sense that she might injects Mitevska’s film with a pleasing dose of danger.
It is 1948, we’re in the broiling heart of Kolkata and Sister Teresa has tired of her teaching role at the Loreto Entally convent. “I’m a woman in a system run by men,” she complains to sympathetic Father Friedrich (Nikola Ristanovski), although she has also heard a call from the big man upstairs.
