Roman Catholic nuns on screen have a perpetual fascination dating back to Lilian Gish in the silents, with their promise of taking the audience backstage for hidden glimpses of convent life and saintly living. Katrin Brocks’ first feature, The Great Silence (Den Store Stilhed) is set in a small, modern Danish convent full of big windows and uncomfortable-looking Scandi furniture, where the earnest young Sister Alma is eagerly looking forward to taking her final vows as a nun. Her lofty ideals and religious vocation come in for a final test when Erik, her estranged brother just out of rehab, drops by demanding money and opening old wounds. This psychological drama, shot with a faint, teasing touch of Goth, bowed in the New Directors section at San Sebastian. Despite treading a well-worn dramatic path, it’s a festival-worthy vessel that introduces Brocks as a bright talent to watch.
Far from being a critique of religious life and the constraints it places on women (Jacques Rivette’s Diderot adaptation The Nun, Marco Bellocchio’s Manzoni adaptation Blood of My Blood), The Great Silence describes the convent as a modern and surprisingly tolerant institution, a collective of women who choose to wear the traditional long habits (rather unusual today) and spend their lives in prayer and meditation. It offers a safe environment for someone like Sister Alma (Kristine Kujath Thorp), whose blithe smile and humble obedience to orders hide a deeply troubled past and massive insecurity. Screenwriters Marianne Lentz and Brocks follow a familiar playbook when they introduce Alma’s hell-raising brother Erik early on and use him as the classic catalyst to resolve a buried trauma in her past.
It’s pretty clear something is wrong in her head in an ironing scene where she rolls up her long sleeve and presses the iron long and hard into her skin. It is not the first time she has inflicted self-harm, but it is a well-planted clue to keep us guessing about the angelic-faced sister. Another curious incident: in a conversation with the mother superior, Sister Miriam (a balanced Karen-Lise Mynster, who is willing to make compromises with the world at large), there is a valise full of cash stashed in a closet, all money that Alma has donated to the convent after her father’s death. It gives her a subtle edge over the others, which Kujath Thorp quietly communicates in her self-confident attitude.
Her certainties are soon shaken to the core when her red-haired bro Erik (Elliott Crosset Hove) turns up, sober but anxious to have his share of the inheritance, even if their father cut him out. It rocks Alma’s inner world when Sister Miriam grants him permission to stay at the convent during the “days of ember”, supposedly a period when the nuns observe complete silence, though oddly there is no sign in the film that they actually do so. She rightly perceives his slightly manic presence as a threat to the smothering life in which she’s walling herself up. Sister Miriam’s motives are subject to interpretation: a last test for Alma? A chance to redeem the lost sinner Erik? In the empty wing where he is given a bed, the shadows grow darker in D.P. Mia Mai Denso Graabaek’s striking cinematography that emphasizes strange angles and objects, complemented by spooky sound design.
It comes as a surprise that, in the end, a more realistic, light-of-day resolution replaces the darkness surrounding not just Alma’s past, but that of a dying old nun with dementia whose inarticulate mumblings seemed like dire predictions to Alma and Erik. It leaves a soft glow around the convent and makes that life a much more rational, even plausible choice.
Well-cast in the leading roles are the two strong young actors, Kujath Thorp, star of the recent Norwegian thriller The Burning Sea, and Crosset Hove, who played a similarly outcast sibling in Icelandic filmmaker Hlynur Palmason’s Winter Brothers. Compared to his gushing tell-all emotionality, Kujath Thorpe is most effective in staring out of spirited eyes with an otherworldly look that could easily be interpreted as neurosis.
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