Critics reviews

Bielenia's damp-eyed performance is the broken heart of this restrained and low-key narrative... Caught somewhere between guilt and martyrdom, his fate ultimately poses poignant, rather than pointed, questions about the nature of faith beyond religion, compassion beyond covenant.

Like Maria Falconetti before him, Bielenia holds the camera with his gaze and it holds him right back, in an almost ecstatic mutual embrace... The power and the glory of “Corpus Christi” reside in the film’s leading man, whose ineffable combination of wildness and purity makes for an absolutely electrifying central performance.

[An] irresistible movie, a sort of cross between Paul Schrader’s recent film of spiritual crisis, “First Reformed,” and Steven Spielberg’s “Catch Me If You Can.” An impostor as anguished priest.

This is a blistering drama, intense, disturbing and inescapably thought-provoking, a film that gets its power from a merging of potent opposites... “Corpus Christi” is riveting right up to its closing frame. The thrilling narrative power of complex moral decisions is simply not to be denied.

Komasa avoids putting too fine a point on his ironic thesis in Corpus Christi by complicating it. The priest reveals his subject to be forgiveness: “Forgive means love. Love someone despite their guilt.” Komasa similarly challenges the audience by contrasting piety with impudence.

Bielenia is a dead ringer for a young Christopher Walken, and he carries glimmers of the veteran actor’s unsettling intensity, too. There’s an unpredictability to his performance, a sense of both swagger and searching that’s fascinating to watch.

[Corpus Christi] engages with the dour without becoming bitter, and a film that allows for redemption but only through the hardest possible work. It’s a film that’s built on a lie but sees only the underlying truth. What an astounding religious drama, and what a beautifully realistic morality play.

This is a movie that doesn’t want to coddle an audience so much as challenge it. It wants you to think about what redemption really means, who doles out and who deserves penance... It wants you to see the value in a religion’s emphasis on second chances without devolving into doctrine-stumping. It preaches without being preachy.

An intense, sometimes nearly operatic drama... Some of its moves are as familiar (and as easy to tune out) as a liturgy; others flirt with the divinely mysterious.

Some of its moves are as familiar (and as easy to tune out) as a liturgy; others flirt with the divinely mysterious.

The idea that a charlatan might offer more solace than a real priest is a trite concept, but it’s one that “Corpus Christi” portrays with conviction. The movie rests on the shoulders of Bielenia — or rather, in his eyes, which photograph as a chilling gray.

“Corpus Christi” is neither a parable nor an allegory, yet image after image seems charged with intent, from the opening shot... to the climax, an apocalyptic welter of fire and blood.