Starring: Katarzyna Zawadzka, Marian Dziedziel, Anna Radwan
Directed by: Barbara Sass
Rating: ★☆☆☆☆
After an eleven-year break from the big screen Barbara Sass has put aside her activity as a stage director and returned to movie making. Sass took an interest in the Kazimierz Dolny nunnery affair when a baby was discovered in the bunker-like convent after its occupants were evicted in 2007. Despite a nation-wide scandal, investigations led nowhere, and Sass herself admits that her reconstruction of events is far from certain. She opted to push forward her project by writing a screenplay based loosely on known events.
The vaguely Sapphic film poster, showing an ambiguous manifestation of affection between the abbess (Anna Radwan) and doubting nun Anna (Katarzyna Zawadzka, who won a Golden Lion in Gdynia) hints strongly that this film was intended to be a succès de scandale. The daily routine of the nunnery is disrupted by the arrival of Father Franciszek (Mariusz Bonaszewski), who aims to evict Satan using decidedly unconventional methods.
Neurologist Laura Bossi wrote that we live in an age when the word ‘Devil’ has almost disappeared from the vocabulary of the church. In W imieniu diabła (In the Name of the Devil), Satan is incessantly and awkwardly evoked. The film does not display a scrap of authentic spirituality, nor a grain of the self-conscious irony of the postmodern horror genre.
Originally published by The Krakow Post on October 21, 2011