Beyond the Hills

Directed by Cristian Mungiu

(Not rated)

***

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This “provocative and difficult” movie should be watched in the company of friends when you have the entire day to discuss it, said Mary Pols in Time. It tells “a grueling but perfectly crafted story” about a young Romanian woman who visits a convent to convince her best friend to leave, only to clash fatefully with the zealots in charge. At the 2012 Cannes film festival, Cristina Flutur and Cosmina Stratan shared the Best Actress award, which seems appropriate, said Dana Stevens in Slate.com. As girls who grew up together in an orphanage and apparently became lovers before taking different paths, the two performers are “impeccable.” What befalls Flutur’s unstable character once she begins loudly quarreling with convent dogma “seems at once medievally mad and wholly inevitable,” said Anthony Lane in The New Yorker. But even though the story was inspired by a botched 2005 exorcism, this subtitled film “is by no means an easy broadside against religious fervor.” It instead depicts “a tug of war” between old values and new, a war in which people don’t need to be wicked to effect destruction.