By the Grace of God (2019)

François Ozon's By the Grace of God arrives as a sober specimen from another era of filmmaking, patient and journalistic in a way that contemporary cinema has largely forgotten. Alexandre, a Lyon banking executive with a wife and five children, discovers that the priest who abused him decades ago still works with children, and the film follows him as he gathers other victims and builds a legal case. It is a serious film about a grave subject. We must be clear that gravity is not the same as the cultural sensibilities under examination here. The massacre of the innocents has been filmed many times without registering on this particular scale.

The cast is entirely white and French, assembled for verisimilitude rather than for the optics of inclusion. Women appear as wives, therapists, and church functionaries, but the film makes no argument about patriarchy. Nobody discusses race. No character frets about the climate. The villain is an institution protecting its own reputation, which is not the same as a critique of capital, however satisfying it might be to watch a cardinal squirm. One of the victims, Emmanuel, is a tormented man whose life has collapsed under what was done to him, and the film treats this as damage, not as a neurotype awaiting accommodation. The moral vocabulary is Catholic and French, which is to say old.

The filmmaking is calm to the point of austerity. Ozon stages confrontations, emails, and meetings with a documentarian's neutrality, and he declines to instruct the audience on how to feel. There is no sermon here, only procedure. That restraint is precisely why the film registers as zero on the scale before us. It is a well made and genuinely moving work, and it belongs to a tradition that predates the current cultural accounting entirely.