Stations of the Cross

The movies have provided some barbed satires of Christianity down the years (Monty Python's The Life of Brian, Dogma), but director Dietrich Brüggemann takes aim at too many easy targets in this droll meditation on the 14 stages of Christ's journey to Calvary. It follows the efforts of 14-year-old Maria (Lea van Acken), a devout member of a strict Catholic sect in present-day Germany, as she tries to befriend a music-loving classmate (Moritz Knapp) without going against the stern teachings of her priest and her devout mother (Franziska Weisz). Van Acken's decision to fast in a sacrificial effort to make her little brother speak for the first time seems harmless. But in seeking to expose the specious tenets of the sect, Brüggemann falls prey to his own miraculous contrivance. The use of a static camera for the majority of the vignettes imposes a stylistic rigour to match the religious intransigence. But the action veers between acerbic mockery and gauche melodrama, while the performances are often leaden, with Weisz's dictatorial but evidently disappointed matriarch being far too cartoonish to convince.