THE STORY – Kolkata, India, August 1948. Teresa, Mother Superior of the convent of the Sisters of Loreto, is anxiously waiting for the letter that will finally allow her to leave her monastery and create a new order in response to the call she has received from God. And just as everything seems ready, she finds herself faced with a dilemma that challenges her own ambitions and faith at a major turning point in her life.
THE CAST – Noomi Rapace, Sylvia Hoeks & Nikola Ristanovski
THE TEAM – Teona Strugar Mitevska (Director/Writer), Goce Smilevski & Elma Tataragić
THE RUNNING TIME – 104 Minutes
The 82nd Venice Film Festival is back in full swing, and audiences at the Lido might struggle to keep the similarly titled “Mother”, “Father”, or even “Father Bother Brother Sister” straight (the latter still awaiting its reviews). The challenge deepens when “Mother” itself invokes all those words in passing. What sounds like a title joke at first, however, is taken literally: competing for the Golden Lion, Teona Strugar Mitevska’s “Mother” follows Mother Teresa (played by Noomi Rapace) at a decisive moment of self-discovery, when she resolves to sacrifice not only her privacy but her entire life to be close to the poor, to bless the sick, and to embody a model of spiritual devotion.
Rather than covering the full sweep of Mother Teresa’s life, Mitevska condenses her story into the space of a single week. It is a bold structural choice, designed to strip away the conventional cradle-to-grave trappings of the biopic and instead focus on a concentrated period of doubt, clarity, and transformation. In this brief yet profound span, we witness Rapace’s Teresa grappling with her faith, her role within the Church, and her capacity to love in the most expansive sense of the term. The decision to frame Teresa as a woman caught at a crossroads between personal intimacy and collective responsibility is a compelling one. As played by Rapace, Teresa is trapped in a convent that she repeatedly refers to as a prison, a cloistered environment where women are expected to demonstrate absolute obedience to the rules of a male-defined system.
The film’s dialogue makes this dilemma explicit. “You made your choice when you fell in love with a man, and now you’ll bear the consequences,” one character pronounces with jarring solemnity. The line epitomizes the tonal tightrope “Mother” walks: aspiring to a spiritual weight while frequently sliding into moments of unintentional comedy. Such incongruities recall Mitevska’s earlier works, including “God Exists, Her Name is Petrunya” and “The Happiest Man in the World,” both of which center on individuals resisting entrenched systems. In “Mother,” the director clearly seeks to inscribe Teresa into this lineage of resistance, reframing her not only as a saintly figure but also as a woman engaged in a battle against structures of control.
On paper, this limited focus on seven days promises an intimate, unconventional portrait. In practice, however, the result often maintains a surprising distance between the audience and its subject. The film seems hesitant to take sides, hovering uneasily between reverence and critique, never quite committing to either perspective. Rapace’s performance supplies some of the richest texture, her portrayal offering glimpses of a Teresa who can shift from tender and fragile in one moment to authoritarian and rigid in the next. Festival director Alberto Barbera praised her for capturing “every nuance of this controversial figure,” and indeed, there are flashes of remarkable complexity where Teresa seems simultaneously human, conflicted, and profoundly flawed. Yet just as often, the film recoils, unwilling to probe into the darker recesses of Teresa’s reputation: her strictness, her associations with global power, or the ambiguities of her charitable work.
Stylistically, “Mother” is equally conflicted. Restless camerawork, austere long takes, and feverish convent-nightmares aim to evoke transcendence, but the effect is more self-conscious than immersive. The imagery veers toward a Malick-inspired level of pastiche, laced with heavy-metal flourishes, calling attention to its own “arthouse seriousness” rather than drawing viewers into Teresa’s spiritual crisis. The ambition to craft a cinematic language of rupture is evident; however, the results are uneven and mannered. It’s gestures toward faith as both liberation and oppression, compassion as a mask for cruelty. A standout moment comes when a priest unexpectedly voices a progressive line on abortion – a reminder that a movie about Mother Theresa in 2025 can sound more radical than certain contemporary politicians. Yet sparks like these never ignite into sustained critique. The film seems torn between stripping away the myth and fearing the consequences of doing so.
This unresolved tension makes “Mother” a frustrating experience. It promises to reveal “the woman behind the myth,” but circles around her cautiously, hinting at contradictions without fully confronting them. The push and pull leave the film stranded in a gray zone: an earnest, ambitious experiment that ultimately feels timid. It is neither a radical demythologization nor a sanctified portrait. Instead, Mitevska’s film occupies an uneasy middle ground, straining for profundity while often falling short of insight. The ambition is undeniable, and Rapace lends conviction to what is nearly an impossible role, but the result never coheres into a fully satisfying whole.
As a piece of cinema then, “Mother” leaves a divided impression. It is too reverent to be truly revelatory, and too solemn to achieve genuine subversion. Opening the Venice Festival, a position often intended to signal the boldness of the program, the film feels like a cautious choice rather than a daring one. What lingers is not the spark of spiritual renewal one might expect from a film about such a personality, nor the exhilaration of seeing a myth decisively deconstructed. Instead, the prevailing impression is of an opportunity missed. Still, the attempt itself deserves recognition. Few filmmakers have sought to capture Teresa in this mode, uncertain, vulnerable, not yet canonized by history. That Mitevska dares to place her under such a lens, and that Rapace accepts the burden of embodying her contradictions, speaks to a specific level of creative courage. But courage in conception is not always enough. The result is a film that invites contemplation rather than applause, leaving its audience with questions that the work itself is unwilling or unable to answer.
