Bones; earth; worker; murderer. These are not words that any language course would suggest as the basic building blocks for communication in a new tongue. But for Spanish-speaking Teresa (a riveting Manuela Martelli), the charred heart of God Will Not Help,” they are the first terms she learns in the rural dialect native to the remote part of Croatia to which she has traveled all the way from Chile. The cataclysmic effect of her unexpected arrival suggests that soon her vocabulary will expand to include more such ominous language. Words like danger; hypocrite; blood; fire.
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It is just after the dawn of the 20th century, and just before dawn one pitch-black night, when Teresa shows up at an isolated homestead nestled under glowering mountains. She is greeted at gunpoint by Milena (Ana Marija Veselčić), the house’s sole occupant while the menfolk are away in the hills grazing the sheep. But gradually Milena’s hostility subsides as, through gestures and references to the pictures in Teresa’s little pocket-book of prayers, she comes to understand that this strange creature, neatly clad in a corseted black gown so unlike her own sackcloth shift, is her sister-in-law. And the handful of bones she carries are all that remains of her husband, Milena’s brother, Marko.
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A fragile bond springs up between the women, despite the linguistic and cultural gulf that separates them. Perhaps that’s because, as we learn when Milena’s casually vicious younger brother Nikola (Mauro Ercegović Gracin) comes down from the mountain, she herself is an outcast within this small family, treated like dirt and nicknamed “Mute” even though she isn’t. The three of them journey to find the eldest brother and head of the clan, Ilija (Filip Đurić), who has a wife and children of his own and who has acquired an almost priestlike reputation for piety in the local community.
Teresa inspires equal parts suspicion and fascination within the family. But especially in Ilija, who, as she settles in and proves a competent, hard worker and a strangely soul-soothing shepherding companion, finds it harder to conceal his highly impious, adulterous attraction to her. He demurs when Nikola seeks his permission to marry Teresa, despite that being the common custom, as a way to keep a widow’s inherited landshare within the family.
All of the bargaining occurs in murmured conversations that Teresa can hear but cannot understand, though sometimes we suspect she gets more of a gist than she lets on. The language barrier is exploited in unusually inventive ways by Jušić’s clever screenplay, which never resorts to the usual cheats but instead lets mutual incomprehension create pockets of nonverbal intimacy, and hypnotic, incantatory scenes where someone will tell Teresa a story, precisely because she cannot translate it. It’s like making a confession without fear of judgment or punishment or loss of face.
But Teresa is much more than a mere sounding board for the fears and desires of others. At times, as the skirts of her talismanic dress (an eloquent bit of costume design by Katarina Pilić) whip behind her in the wind, she looks like a crow or some other dark, skittering creature of ill omen. At others, seen from far away in one of DP Jana Plećaš’ gravely beautiful wide shots, in which the mountains overwhelm the little people pinned to their slopes, she looks less like a woman than a woman-shaped hole in the landscape. And elsewhere still, as she wanders about in the dark despite the circling wolves, and sees visions of past sins while muttering prayers with a stone in her mouth, we can detect a hungry, ungovernable wildness in her. We’re given to wonder if maybe she is not quite real, maybe a witch or an avenging angel, or perhaps simply one of history’s many successful, charismatic imposters.
Because despite her corset and rustling gown, there is a serrated edge of modernity to Teresa, enhanced by the brilliantly anachronistic synth score composed by Stavros Evangelou, Iris Asimakopoulou and Vasilis Chontos. The character’s defiant self-possession would unnerve even a more contemporary patriarchy, and challenge family dynamics in any era.
So while on the surface they’re miles apart, there is a certain continuity between this film and Jušić’s 2016 debut “Quit Staring at my Plate,” although “God Will Not Help” is more mature in craft and, paradoxically, more expansive for being set in the narrow crevices of the past. Yet even at 137 minutes, it never drags. Instead it slowly scorches deeper, an ember that carries inside it the potential at any moment to ignite with some uncontrollable emotion. With love, with longing, with righteous rage or shameful guilt, on a sacrificial pyre or in the eternal flames of hell: There are so many ways to burn.
