Lucas, the wayfaring Lutheran priest at the centre of the extraordinary Godland, is having a rough time of it. Far from his native Denmark, and charged with building a new parish in the hostile wilds of Iceland, he’s losing his faith and his mind at an equal pace. But that’s par for the course in films about his kind. Few vocations get a worse rap on screen than the man of God, whether it’s forbidden desires or invading demons disrupting his regular business. Played with slowly unravelling composure by a marvellous Elliott Crosset Hove, Lucas isn’t as dark-souled as some of his cinematic brethren, but he rather overestimates his own spiritual strength. Penetrating and darkly funny, Hlynur Pálmason’s film (now on DVD and streaming, if you missed its ravishing imagery in cinemas) finds him a formidable foe in rural agnosticism.
In The Mission, Jeremy Irons’s Spanish Jesuit priest succeeds in converting indigenous South Americans to his cause; it’s the Portuguese colonialists who get in the way. Roland Joffé’s stately film takes a somewhat romantic view of the missionary’s duty, even if it all ends sourly anyway. Following Portuguese Jesuits into 17th-century Japan, Martin Scorsese’s superb, oddly underrated Silence (ITVX) offers a more even-handed perspective on the missionary priests as colonisers, dividing its sympathies between their idealism and local people’s resistance.
