Even in today’s increasingly secular world, where the steady promise of technology continues to decrease reliance on the fickle will of God, there’s no shortage of crimes committed in the name of some distant deity. Yet for all the attention such violence receives, these acts also seem inherently desperate, struggling against a status quo which views faith as a personal pursuit rather than a global mandate. Such aggression is less often perpetrated by inspired true believers than the dispossessed and down-and-out, caught in the thrall of fringe groups, which hope to shore up their influence against undefeatable adversaries, calling on the glory of a higher power to inspire their troops to battle.
The doomed girl at the center of Stations of the Cross, a teenaged Christ wannabe with a penchant for self-sacrifice, is one of these desperate characters. Her violence may be directed exclusively against herself, but the cinematic test case presented here bears all the markers of fundamentalism taken to the extreme, with nuance and deliberation disposed of in favor of pure zealous conviction. The audience is first introduced to 14-year-old Maria (Lea van Acken) in her final confirmation class, where she is instructed to act as a warrior for god. The young girl takes this as license to sacrifice herself, in the hopes that her mute younger brother will miraculously gain the gift of speech. The titular passage, as conveyed in classical art, traces the death of Jesus across 14 steps, from condemnation to burial. The film’s version follows Maria, presented as Christ’s modern analogue, through a similar course, making last-ditch entreaties toward life while aimed fixedly toward death, a lamb being led to the slaughter.
This occurs in large part thanks to the actions of Anna’s guardians: an abusive mother, a helpless au pair and a father who does nothing to protect his mistreated daughter. Yet for all the damning evidence the film gathers against the cloistered cruelty of fundamentalism, it’s hard to grasp the immediate significance of such a story, or to imagine any serious societal threat posed by the regressive hard-line Catholics it depicts. A group like this is such a dwindling minority, so fixated on living apart from the mainstream, that it’s hard to see its actions as demonstrative of any aspect of modern society. Stations of the Cross doesn’t aim for allegory either, and any potential emotional qualities end up negated by the insistent frostiness of its tone. What’s left is a mean curiosity of a film, one that focuses all its energy on the sustained depiction of its central tragedy, a self-flagellatory exercise that seems dependent on a certain de rigueur mode of modern Teutonic social criticism, working off the idea that in order to be learning about the flaws of the societal systems in which we’re all complicit, we also need to be suffering.
It’s interesting then that beyond its gloomy subject matter and restrictive structure, which works off 14 fixed-camera endurance tests, Stations of the Cross is still perversely engaging. Brüggemann is skilled at coordinating movement within these limited setups, and it’s easy to imagine a version of this story that wasn’t so dependent on gimmickry and casual cruelty, one that might view faith as a part of life rather than a monstrous aberration. In telling the tale of one girl’s misguided pursuit of martyrdom, it gets too wrapped up in its focus on deprivation, the limited perspective of the unmoving camera paralleling the things Maria robs herself of to keep devout, from supposedly Satanic musical rhythms to innocent advances from a boy at school. The result is needlessly harsh and numbingly one-note, communicating less about the relationship between religious faith, righteous violence and self-sacrifice than its own desire to scold, torment and harangue.