A Star Is Born in Rural France

The word on the street is that Inde Navarrette is being touted as a Best Actress nominee contender for her role as a friendly crush gone bad in Curry Barker’s low-budget breakout horror movie, “Obsession.” As your humble scribe noted, Ms. Navarrette is headed for stardom, but let me add an additional two cents for another scarifying performance. That would be Maria Wróbel as a distraught teen on the verge of adulthood in Julia Kowalski’s “Her Will Be Done.” Ms. Wróbel’s take on a young woman marked by tragedy and fettered by circumstance is peculiar in its intensity. Her performance should not go unheralded.Ms. Kowalski’s picture is too niche and, perhaps, too foreign to gain attention on the scale of “Obsession.” Still, “Her Will Be Done” is worth seeking out. It’s a compelling, if not altogether flawless, morality tale that finds an unlikely medium between fantasy and sociology, Stephen King and Shirley Jackson, Roger Corman and Michael Haneke. The director’s 2023 short, “I Saw the Face of the Devil,” bears mentioning in that it also featured Ms. Wróbel as a young woman who believes she is possessed.We don’t see the devil in “Her Will Be Done,” but he is in the details. The picture begins with an evocation of fire and brimstone as we watch a group of figures in a dark forest circling what appears to be a figure that has been set ablaze. The mood is severe; the faces of the participants, haunted. The camera slowly approaches a young girl. We are made privy to her thoughts: “My mother knelt before Satan. The evil was in her. It is inside me too.” Flash to an unlovely French village, a rural milieu that cinematographer Simon Beaufils renders in documentary drab. It is there we meet Nawojka, a twenty-ish woman whom her family and community know as “Naw.” She’s slim, shy and bullied into subservience by loutish older brothers, Tomek (Przemyslaw Przestrzelski) and Bogdan (Kuba Dyniewicz). Naw’s widowed father, Henryk (Wojciech Skibiński), is devoted to the girl, but he depends upon the manpower of the boys to maintain a modest parcel of land.How a Polish family made its way to rural France is never explained. It’s worth noting that Ms. Kowalski’s background is similar, and that “Her Will Be Done” is, as she told Cineuropa, “my own image of immigration, and . . . a metaphor for society in general.” Outsiderdom is a leitmotif of Ms. Kowalski’s film, and it’s embodied not only in Henryk and his kin, but an unknown malady that is felling their cows. A local vet, Franck (Jean-Baptiste Durand from “Misericordia“), is stymied by the deaths of the animals as well as the accumulations of goo that are left in their wake.Another outcast is Sandra (Roxanne Mesquida), a punky bleach-blonde with a leg brace and a bad attitude who shows up in the village looking to sell her family’s home. The community is unhappy that Sandra returned–there’s a lot of bad blood in this small hamlet–but that doesn’t stop the local men from hounding her. Naw is fascinated and frightened by the exotic Sandra, discovering within the scruffy woman appetites that are new and discomfiting. Our heroine is already given to self-sustained moral scrutiny and resultant violent seizures, tendencies we are led to believe are set in motion by the spirit of her dead mother.The scenes in which Naw suffers from what are either delusions or possession are truly unnerving, particularly given how intently Ms. Wróbel extends herself as an actress. A comparison to Linda Blair in William Friedkin’s “The Exorcist” (1973) is warranted and left wanting: Ms. Wróbel is twice as convincing without special effects. There are myriad unpleasantries afoot in this cloistered enclave and the overall mood is freighted by an unwieldy combination of guilt, lust and despair. “Her Will Be Done” is harsh and often unpleasant, but it does go on to suggest that though sin is burdensome, it is not insurmountable. This is a movie of unexpected depth.

A Star Is Born in Rural France

A Star Is Born in Rural France

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