“Despite its shortcomings, there remains a compelling story within Marie Madeleine: a story about the power of friendship and the possibility of finding meaning through human connection in an increasingly fractured world”

“There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.” – Margaret Thatcher (1987, Woman’s Own magazine)

More than a retelling of the story of Mary Magdalene set in Haiti, Gessica Généus’ film is, in many respects, an examination, or at least an attempt at one, of one of the greatest sources of anxiety in contemporary life: the slow but relentless erosion of any communal dimension of existence. It is a reality that seems to confirm Margaret Thatcher’s infamous assertion that there is no such thing as society, only individuals, granting material form to the bleakness of that statement in ways perhaps unimaginable when it was first uttered by the Iron Lady.

This becomes evident from the opening sequence, when Madeleine (Gessica Généus), a prostitute in Jacmel, collapses in the middle of the street after suffering a miscarriage. It is here that her path crosses with Joseph’s (Béonard Monteau), a young Christian pastor living under the shadow of his religiously fanatical father. Joseph helps Madeleine and takes her to the emergency room, yet no one is willing to treat her. Her suffering, in the eyes of the doctors and nurses, is merely the consequence of her own choices. There is no room, no medicine, no resources to be “wasted” on a prostitute. She must help herself. So, in what is perhaps the film’s most powerful scene, Madeleine, slightly more stable after being rejected by the hospital staff, steals a diaper from a mother carrying her baby, straps it to herself to contain the bleeding, and asks Joseph for some spare change to buy a lottery ticket. Even when people work together, they are ultimately left alone to improvise whatever means of survival they can.

What follows is a portrait of this fragmentation. At the brothel where Madeleine works the women care for one another while simultaneously competing for potential clients. Across the street stands an evangelical church led by Joseph’s father. People alternate between prayer, tending to their congregation, and harassing the women outside.

It is worth noting how Généus captures not only Haitian society, but also a broader and increasingly global divide. At night, evangelical services and voodoo ceremonies unfold simultaneously. Different worlds, different forms of poetry, music, and collective ritual coexist within the same city. Religious conservatives, prostitutes, queer people, and countless others wander through the night chanting their own songs, each searching for a personal definition of salvation. Yet these two sides of the same social reality, despite their similarities, do not possess equal political power or agency, and it is precisely here that Marie Madeleine begins to falter in its analysis of such a social division. What separates these groups ultimately proves stronger than what unites them, and even friendship, which ought to be the film’s central concern, as a means of reconstructing communal bonds, is sidelined and never fully explored.

Joseph’s father exemplifies this weakness. For much of the film, he contributes little either to his relationship with his son or to the broader thematic argument. Nearly every meaningful insight into their dynamic emerges through the interactions between Joseph and Marie Madeleine rather than through any direct confrontation between father and son. More troublingly, the film never seems fully capable of articulating that religion’s ability to occupy spaces abandoned by the state, and, in many cases, to replace it altogether, should not entail any absolution of the violence committed in its name.

The film goes to great lengths to demonstrate how poverty and abandonment draw people toward extremism, yet it dedicates far less time to developing its protagonists. Instead, it seems to expect the audience to intuitively sympathize with them. The issue is that these characters are just as much victims of poverty and state neglect as the religious fundamentalists, and yet many of them do not embrace the same forms of extremism or violence.

It is revealing that after the opening sequence, Marie is frequently shown in far healthier conditions: close to nature, wandering through beautiful landscapes, and no longer wearing the pink wig associated with her work. She practices voodoo and even reconfigures Thatcher’s infamous “there are individual men and women and there are families” into something more spiritual and poetic. During one scene, she introduces Joseph to her religious practices and tells him that, in that space, there are no men or women, only souls.

After nearly dying in the brothel, Marie suddenly appears freer than ever, speaking about rejecting social conventions in pursuit of a more liberated existence. This transformation, however, sits uneasily beside another scene in which a social worker urges the women at the brothel to insist that clients wear condoms, only for them to respond: “But how?” They possess no social power whatsoever, so where exactly does Marie’s newfound agency come from? From her encounter with Joseph, nicknamed “Lil Jesus”? From herself? From some form of spiritual rebirth triggered by their friendship?

Structurally, the film never fully explains this change, despite placing their meeting at the center of Marie’s transformation. Joseph himself remains deeply broken: a man deprived of his father’s affection, sexually repressed, and trapped within the very institution that persecutes the women he attempts to help. While his friendship with Marie appears to place her on a new path, no equivalent transformation occurs within him. Even in his moments of compassion, Joseph still represents the same church that harasses these women and physically punishes him for associating with them.

As a result, the film overlooks a crucial fact: the chance of reinventing oneself can never be separated from the material conditions that make such reinvention possible. Even the religious baptism, taken literally, also belongs to the realm of reality. What religion offers is the promise of a better future, a promise that mirrors capitalism’s greatest myth: the idea that individuals can endlessly reinvent themselves. One simply has to work for it, to choose it, to perform it. We become entrepreneurs of the self, constantly selling and reshaping our identities. Yet the characters’ material conditions remain unchanged. Poverty, violence, and exploitation persist. What is offered instead is a vow, a promise of salvation deferred to some future moment that never quite arrives.

And yet, despite these shortcomings, there remains a compelling story within Marie Madeleine: a story about the power of friendship and the possibility of finding meaning through human connection in an increasingly fractured world. If religion can fill the voids left by collapsing institutions, then perhaps friendship and interpersonal solidarity can do the same. In this sense, the film gestures toward a far richer interpretation of the gospel tradition, one closer to Plato’s understanding of friendship not merely as a social bond, but as an existential condition in itself. It is, however, a gesture that ultimately remains underdeveloped, never fully explored with the depth or complexity the film’s themes seem to demand.