‘Serviam — I Will Serve’: Sarajevo Review

Dir: Ruth Mader. Austria. 2022. 106 mins.

The latest in a long line of films to depict unholy behaviour behind convent walls, Serviam — I Will Serve sees Austrian director/co-writer Ruth Mader straddle arthouse and genre modes with variable results. Set in a nun-run elite school for pre-teen girls some time in the 1980s, the cumbersomely-monikered picture (whose original German subtitle, Ich will Dienen, actually translates as “I want to serve”) stars the reliably creepy Maria Dragus as an unnamed Sister with unorthodox ideas about how to bring her charges closer to God.

A determinedly downbeat exercise in moody atmospherics

Premiering near-simultaneously in the main competitions at both Locarno and Sarajevo forms a classy sort of launch pad, even though the prevailing fright-picture vibe — heavily underlined throughout by Manfred Plessl’s intrusive score — renders Mader’s third fictional feature primarily of interest for festivals and platforms skewing towards horror and related genres.

She reteams with co-scriptwriter Martin Leidenfrost, her collaborator on her social-realist debut Struggle (2003) and sci-fi-inflected Life Guidance (2017). (Mader is far from prolific, her only other feature-length work being the 2012 documentary What Is Love.) Their screenplay follows a familiar template, most perfectly exemplified by Dario Argento’s Suspiria: a new pupil arrives at an educational establishment, quickly works out that something is amiss, tragedy strikes, the protagonist digs deeper, and eventually resolution is obtained.

The newcomer here is Sabine — played with impressively steely self-possession by first-timer Leona Lindinger — who semi-reluctantly rooms with the sensitive, much-bullied Sandy (Anna Elisabeth Berger). The focus of Sabine’s mounting concern, however, is Martha (Sophia Gomez-Schreiber), pet pupil of the automaton-like, rigidly devout Sister. The latter’s instruction includes supplying the girl with a painful “penance belt” made of hooked wire; the pair pursue the decidedly old-school Catholic concept that bodily experiencing Christ’s pain brings the sufferer closer to divine understanding and grace.

Mader effectively conjures the requisite aura of unwholesome claustrophobia, considerably boosted by the production design of Renate Martin and Andreas Donhauser (aka “Donmartin Supersets”). Only in the last seconds does the action stray from the confines of the convent — a blocky, geometric modern building of pale greys, washed-out blues and carefully oppressive austerity. Period detail is chiefly a matter of the clothing and hairstyles sported by the intermittently-glimpsed parents of the girls, the only jarring anachronism being the kind of wheeled suitcase which only became commonplace in the 21st century. 

As a determinedly downbeat exercise in moody atmospherics, Serviam — I Will Serve passes muster. Christine A. Maier’s visuals (which often deploy symmetrical and near-symmetrical compositions) echo the aesthetics familiar from the most prominent Austrian auteurs of recent years, from Michael Haneke to Ulrich Seidl to Jessica Hausner.

These superficial parallels are deceptive, however: the unsubtly ominous score, in tandem with Niki Mossboeck’s editing, quickly steer proceedings into rather flashier and splashier dramatic terrain. (No coincidence that the most effective use of music is a “borrowing” of a Schubert piano piece from Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon.) And while Mader is happy to flirt with well-established horror and thriller conventions, her departures from them are sometimes ill-advised — such as the occasional interpolation of fantastical animated sequences (by Studio Urbanek) which play like theological-metaphysical hallucinations.

More problematic is the climax, which amps up the threateningly sinister mood to a nerve-rattling degree but then frustratingly fails to deliver the kind of Grand Guignol catharsis — see Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta — which the viewer has been led to expect.