Starring Lou de Laâge. In French, Polish, and Russian, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable

As with religion itself, there may be a dwindling audience for sober-sided dramas like The Innocents. This period piece is set in Poland at the end of World War II, and French director Anne Fontaine (working with four other screenwriters) doesn’t glamourize the fact-based story. Still, if you make space for its contemplative rhythms, the movie does have something to offer the soul.

Up-and-coming Lou de Laâge, a Leslie Caron type with bee-stung lips and probing eyes, plays Mathilde Beaulieu, a Red Cross volunteer with a French medical team in the winter of 1945. The daughter of ardent communists, she’s having a desultory semi-affair with a doctor (Vincent Macaigne) who lost his own parents to the Holocaust, when she’s flagged down by a nun from a nearby convent.

Many of her flock were raped by their Russian “liberators” and are now hugely pregnant. They dare not alert local authorities in this volatile atmosphere, so Mathilde becomes a kind of midwife-confessor—especially for the slightly older Maria (excellent Agata Buzek), worldly enough to speak French. They initially attempt to hide these ministrations from the stern abbess (Agata Kulesza), but mother superior jumps the gun by spiriting the newborns off to foster homes. So she says.

Fontaine has veered between literate comedies (Gemma Bovery) and thorny dramas (Adore), and here she’s almost too restrained, with just a few bursts of implicit violence and rhapsodic Chopin punctuating nearly two hours of liturgical gloom. The Vermeer-like compositions of cinematographer Caroline Champetier, who also shot Ponette and Holy Motors, have their own special aura, however. And the movie, also known as Agnus Dei, has an unexpectedly uplifting finish.