“A beautiful film in terms of imagery, but also in the way it conveys Teresa’s inner tug of war through those images.”

“Should I become a mother?”

Mother Teresa was a saint. But, going by some of the controversies surrounding her, perhaps also a bit of a sinner. Carrying out her missionary work in Calcutta, India, for most of her life, her decades-long caring for the poorest of the poor in that city’s slums earned her a Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. But she was a complex woman, and that is exactly how Teona Strugar Mitevska, like Mother Teresa a Macedonian by birth, portrays her in the seven days before she became one of the most prominent religious figures of the 20th century. A multi-faceted biopic that doesn’t follow the common tropes of the genre, let alone the hagiographic rendering of a real-life figure these portraits often turn out to be, Mother is a complicated film that is not without its problems, but features two magnificent performances to anchor the film.

Calcutta, 1948. Teresa (Noomi Rapace) has been the headmistress at a convent school for several years, and has taken the style of ‘Mother’. She is anxiously waiting for a letter from Rome, hoping that it will grant her biggest wish: to start her own order. She runs the school with a mixture of kindness and slightly tyrannical strictness, but her rigor starts to unravel when she is faced with a dilemma: her confidant and prospective successor, Sister Agnieszka (Sylvia Hoeks), is pregnant. She tries to get guidance from the resident priest, Father Friedrich (Nikola Ristanovski), without telling him the predicament she is in, even though they have a relationship of good trust. Sister Agnieszka complicates the future Teresa so ardently yearns for, and she is torn between giving up her dream and doing the unthinkable: help Agnieszka get an abortion so her succession is guaranteed.

Mitevska paints Mother Teresa as a conflicted woman, dedicated to her work and her own pious rule set, but also willing to bend the rules of gods and men to get what she wants. One comes away from Mother with an image of her as ambitious and somewhat manipulative if needed, but also capable of great love and respect towards those dear to her heart. Even so, her first reaction to Agnieszka’s pregnancy is telling: “How could you do this to me?” Her internal struggle between her own selfish wishes and what she believes to be right for the greater good is a fascinating one, and paints a more nuanced picture of a woman who has always been placed on a pedestal. Rapace, with stern face and tense body language, channels Teresa’s doubts and anxious desire for an answer in every fiber of her performance. Mitevska helps her in this regard, often placing Rapace on the bottom edge of the frame in moments when she is despairing, leaving room for negative space above her as if she is in dialogue with God about her predicament. Hoeks, her most prominent counterpart, has an equally challenging and conflicted role as a woman whose pregnancy brings her to the edge of madness, and Hoeks borders on histrionics at times but manages to dial it down to just the right level of drama to remain a believable character.

The film also does a fine job in representing the day-to-day life at a convent school in India in the 1940s, showing that nuns aren’t above a bit of good gossip – something that Teresa and Agnieszka provoke with their erratic and mysterious behavior – while also not shying away from the difficult working conditions when helping the neediest of people. There is a fair amount of gore in the film, in particular when the sisters are treating rotting wounds rife with maggots (and for the more squeamish a shot of them dumping their bloody sanitary towels into a vat of water may already be too much). At times Mitevska misses the mark though; a hallucinatory night scene straight out of a horror film in which Teresa frantically searches for a boy she thinks she has seen, replete with slow-mo shots and set to Lordi’s “Hard Rock Hallelujah”, is a bit much and feels out of place. Elsewhere, an anachronistic and distorted electric guitar-heavy sound design actually heightens the sense of Teresa being on edge; it would have been better to keep it this sparse.

Some of the camera movement is erratic, but for most of the runtime Virginie Saint-Martin’s cinematography is lush without giving the images a polished edge that wouldn’t fit the milieu and the story (an error more traditional biopics often make). Combined with Mitevska’s keen sense for composition this makes Mother not only a beautiful film in terms of imagery, but also in the way it conveys its protagonist’s inner tug of war through those images. It elevates the dynamic between Teresa and Agnieszka, and the way some of their scenes are filmed, you cannot help but wonder if there is something more than mere sisterly feelings from Teresa’s side.

Calling this a biopic in the traditional sense would be incorrect, although it feels as if this week (which is counted down day by day on screen) was a formative one in the life of the public figure that we came to know. The film does provide insight into Teresa’s character regardless of its story not being authorized in any way (even if Mitevska took a quarter century to make it). Moving at a brisk pace despite the fact that the plot entails little more than Teresa waiting for a letter and dealing with Agnieszka’s pregnancy (which is announced very early in the film), Mother is a fascinating look at a character so famous that she is a colloquial comparison point when it comes to charitable work or good deeds, while featuring a strong central performance that humanizes her character. This reaches its apex in a heartfelt moment between Teresa and Friedrich, at which point she asks the question at the top of this review. He insists that she already is a Mother, but with doubt in her voice she explains she meant the lowercase ‘mother’, which is a perfect moment to underline this woman’s complexity and a touching note to end the film on.