Critics reviews

Betts balances the naturalistic exchanges of her sympathetic young cast with bravura set pieces for the seasoned actors, such as Leo's standoff with Denis O'Hare as a smug archbishop come to lay down the law.

Although there are entire scenes devoted to rather nuanced and thoughtful insights on the nature of faith during a particularly turbulent time in the Catholic Church, these feel divorced from the narrative's more highly dramatized scenes. The film's meditative and excessive sides never quite cohere, giving the impression of watching two distinct films that are jostling against each other, rather than united in a single story.

Betts, who also wrote the script, films the young women of the convent with ardent attention, catching hints of skepticism and revolt in small yet unmistakable details. But she undercuts the characters' passion and transcendent devotion with audiovisual commonplaces, familiar acting styles, and a merely anecdotal narrative.

Its strength is in its focus on desperation and desire, made vivid by the possibilities of the convent as insular locale where strict and perverse structures of authority can flourish. The battle between love and power becomes unfocused across multiple vignettes which are only half-resolved. While Novitiate has many strengths, its lack of focus feels like a product of the feature-length format. Betts might have made a great miniseries; instead, her film, while skillful, ultimately feels stilted.

The film bears all the signs of an exceptional talent: Betts has a terrifically controlled visual style that matches the timeless, precise, oppressive nature of her setting... And while her characters are busy denying the physical, her camera captures movement, gestures, glances — there's a whole other narrative going on just beneath the surface of the story proper. Unfortunately, Betts's visual discipline is often undercut by her somewhat indiscriminate, on-the-nose music choices.

Who could ever imagine that a film about nuns struggling to come to terms with the Second Vatican Council (aka Vatican II) might be sexy? But that's exactly what Novitiate is, as well as being stylish, impressively performed and intellectually ambitious as it explores convent life in the early 1960s, capturing a specific historical moment when the Church underwent an irrevocable theological shift.