The Innocents (2016)

THE INNOCENTS  (2016)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Anne Fontaine
    Lou de Laâge, Agata Buzek, Agata Kulesza,
    Vincent Macaigne, Joanna Kulig, Anna Próchniak
The horror doesn't always end when the war does. Sometimes it's only beginning. "The Innocents" takes place in Poland late in 1945, and it's about a French Red Cross doctor who reluctantly goes to investigate a medical emergency at an isolated convent. What she finds there is the fallout from an atrocity. Russian occupation troops have invaded the cloister repeatedly, raping the women and leaving several of them pregnant. For the nuns, the violation isn't just physical and psychological, it's spiritual. They feel they've been damned. Now it's up to the doctor, and even more to the nuns, to try to navigate the nightmare. It all happens in the winter. There's limited light and snow on the ground. The Russians are still around, and only some quick thinking by the doctor prevents what happened before from happening again to all of them. (At another point, the doctor barely escapes being raped herself.) I know this all sounds pretty downbeat, and I guess it is, but there's a glimmer of hope in it, too, and a resolution that's not only life-affirming, but makes perfect sense. Sometimes, for those who survive it, there's light at the end of the horror.