Filmmaker Xavier Beauvois’ film is based on the true story of a small group of monks living in a small, mostly Muslim village in Algeria during their civil war. They offer free care to the local people, grow their own food, pray, teach, read, sing. The simple life you’d expect. Only, as tensions escalate, and local extremists become bolder and more desperate, they find they’re in danger. Do they deny a particular man needed care because of his involvement in the civil war? Beyond that, knowing that it may only be a matter of time before all the brothers are killed, there is much debate within the monastery about whether to stay or go.
What follows is an quietly simple film that’s quietly simple in non-new ways. The situation they’re dealing with is clearly dangerous - one surprising and graphic moment of violence sets those stakes early - but so much of the “action” is each monk coming to terms with the risks and benefits, balancing them with their beliefs of what’s expected of them by God and themselves and their brothers. I’ll admit a bias of a sort: I’m not religious at all, and while I enjoy a good debate over existence and moral responsibility, the motives and ruminations here are almost entirely cerebral. One meeting might have a divided brotherhood, the next might have them all arriving at the same decision, but because they’re all so quiet and pensive, the times in-between don’t feel so much like they’re struggling to decide their own fate as simply waiting for the solution to present itself. The film is shot beautifully, and acted very well, but there’s not enough ‘there’ there in this case. I’m all for quiet films about existence (witness my love of last year’s Le Quattro Volte). But with the stakes here so violently high, to counter that with sober religious self-debate just didn’t engage me.
