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Poland · 2019
1h 56m
Director Jan Komasa
Starring Bartosz Bielenia, Aleksandra Konieczna, Eliza Rycembel, Tomasz Ziętek
Genre Drama
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Danie experiences a spiritual awakening — at a youth detention center. His criminal record prohibits him from applying to a seminary, but he refuses to give up his dream. He’s sent to work at a sawmill, where he instead poses as a priest and ministers the local parish in this story of faith and redemption.
Bielenia captures a vivid sense of the emotions that Daniel experiences from the alertness of a trapped animal at the offenders institution to the euphoria that seems to surge through him after the delivery of a rousing sermon. His committed performance and Komasa’s assured storytelling convince us that God can work in mysterious ways.
The New Yorker by Anthony Lane
Whenever the movie strays from its hero, you feel oddly impatient to get back to him, to watch his cravings do battle with his conscience, and to wonder anew what’s burning in his blue-green gaze.
The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by Barry Hertz
The finale is a gut-punch, but it arrives too long after Komasa has already exhausted most of his story's, and leading man's, energy.
The Hollywood Reporter by David Rooney
There's visual command and a compelling intimacy to the storytelling, plus intellectual engagement in the reflection on who gets to claim nearness to God.
It’s within the murky realm of self-doubt and spiritual anxiety that it’s at its most audacious and compelling.
The film is an important one, but above all, it is an exceptionally pleasing and easy one to watch despite its density. This is partly due to Bartosz’s fantastic performance showing great acting range by going through a whole spectrum of emotions very convincingly and subtly.
The Film Stage by Jared Mobarak
Bielenia delivers a fantastic performance as his character overcomes insecurities and regret to speak the words he knows from experience can help those who’ve lost their way.
The Guardian by Leslie Felperin
Often moving but also disquieting and even intermittently funny, this drama unfurls a spiritual parable that is uniquely Polish but accessible to all.
All of this makes for compelling dramatic conflict, and it’s satisfying to watch an impostor shake up the status quo. But there’s also a soap opera-like dimension to Corpus Christi that threatens the more thoughtful aspects of the script.
I found the entire enterprise a touching, rough-hewn delight, never sparing us the explicit sex and violence of Daniel’s life “before,” moist-eyed in seeing how his “outside the collar” thinking is a tonic for a tortured town that needs to move on.
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