Starring Lea van Acken and Franziska Weisz. In German, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable.

The members of the outwardly ordinary German family in Dietrich Brüggemann’s ascetic drama Stations of the Cross are nothing less than foot soldiers in a war between good and evil.

This is how they’re taught to see themselves as devotees of a small, severely conservative sect that’s quite literally more Catholic than the pope. They’re having none of the mulchy compromises of what they deride as “modern” Catholic parishes: such sentiments are useless in an environment where Satan can do his work at any second of the day, in any turn of conversation or ripple of thought. The burden is constant, the stakes plain and absolute, the scale cosmic.

Brüggemann, who cowrote the screenplay with his sister Anna, wants to show us the mental and physical toll this exacts—on women, specifically—through the descent of devout, bewildered teenage daughter Maria (played with pale fervour by Lea van Acken).

Stations of the Cross borrows its structure from the same source as its title: the 14 traditional images that recount the day of Christ’s crucifixion. Each of the film’s corresponding chapters unfolds in a single long take, framed with static clarity and reverberating with analogies that connect gospel stories to daily life, as in a catechism.

It’s an approach that could easily be mined for irony—and in fact the action sometimes flirts with this, as when a weeping Maria is handed a Kleenex during the chapter called “Veronica Wipes the Face of Jesus”. But there’s always a troubling ambivalence at work while she slowly stifles herself in an act of sexually repressed “sacrifice”, torn between the family’s stylish au pair and its fearsome, paranoid matriarch (the riveting Franziska Weisz).

In this painful light, an apparent miracle near the climax ensures that no one, especially the ardently faithful and the ardently skeptical, will be at ease with Stations of the Cross. But they’ll agree they’ve seen something of deep and powerful relevance.