Shame, self-reproach and secret communications fill this deeply disturbing story of two students in 80s Czechoslovakia
As if in a succession of scenes from a starkly remembered bad dream, this deeply disturbing film in haunting monochrome, from director Ivan Ostrochovský and co-writers Rebecca Lenkiewicz and Marek Lescák, tells the story of two students in a Catholic seminary in early-80s Czechoslovakia, part of the (real life) Pacem in Terris organisation, a collaborationist body through which the church submitted to state control in return for the right to (notional) existence.
Juraj (Samuel Skyva) and Michal (Samuel Polakovič) are fresh-faced boys who arrive at the seminary to find themselves in an austere haunted house of shame, reeking of paranoia, exhaustion and self-reproach. Dissident young priests are secretly communicating with the Vatican and with Radio Free Europe and the priestly authorities have neither the courage to endorse this defiance nor the ruthlessness to suppress it, and so the secret
police are making their malign presence felt – in the form of “Dr Ivan”, who has a blackmailing hold on one of the senior clerics. He is a deeply malevolent man with a skin disorder, played by Vlad Ivanov, another in this actor’s gallery of odious east European authority figures.