In the Name oF.../W Imie...

From Poland, this winner of the Teddy Award (for Best Feature Film with LGBT content) at Berlin 2013 follows a young priest (Andrzej Chyra) as he settles in to his new duties at a rural retreat for delinquent teenage boys. Informal yet dedicated, Father Adam resists the predatory advances of a colleague’s wife and is happy to referee even the most roughhousing games of football. Between duties he runs, a pursuit that is, we soon realise, a displacement activity.

Malgoska Szumowska, the award-winning director of Elles and a producer on Lars von Trier's Antichrist, illuminates the cause of Father Adam's sublimation long before he or anyone else on screen articulates it. A series of shimmering, homoerotically charged tableaux establish a twinned sense of carnality and dread. A suspicious teacher (Lukasz Simlat), a handsome, vulnerable local boy (Mateusz Kosciukiewicz), and the arrival of a savvy, dynamic-changing borstal bully (Tomasz Schuchardt) all add to the protagonist's notion that a net is closing in.

Despite this depressingly familiar theme, Szumowska finds a novel approach in nuance and counterpoint. Balmy vistas hide repressed urges; the gloomiest happenings are animated by the picture’s sense of urgency.

Eschewing the amplification of Antonia Bird's similarly themed Priest, In the Name Of's brand of psycho-drama is a gripping slowburn set to the strains of Band of Horses' Funeral. Leading man Chyra looks increasingly haunted, then desperate, as his character retreats into alcoholism. The closing sequence points toward a dark and vicious cycle.