‘Novitiate’ is mesmerizing tale about mind control

If you could imagine “Full Metal Jacket’s” boot camp bullying reworked into a stern convent training Catholic girls to enter the cloister in 1964 Tennessee, you might come close to this debut from writer/director Margaret Betts. “Novitiate” is challenging, uncomfortable, violent, simple in its message about transformative mind control imposed on youth, superbly acted and technically flawless. The key difference is that Stanley Kubrick’s film was a war story while this is a romance focused on young women drawn to be “brides of Christ,” a story of agony and ecstasy.

The leading role of Sister Cathleen goes to Margaret Qualley, the 22-year-old daughter of Andie McDowell. “People never understand why I want to give it all away to God,” Cathleen says at the opening. Her agnostic single mother (terrifically played by Julianne Nicholson) is deeply bewildered, never grasping how the violent collapse of her marriage a decade earlier turned her daughter away from human longings.

Joining the fictional religious community of the Sisters of Blessed Rose, Cathleen enters a world apart. A conservative order, it holds members to long periods of enforced silence, public confession of personal shortcomings, and even encourages the medieval practice of personal lashing. The hard-hearted Reverend Mother (Malissa Leo in thrilling form) ignores the fact that most of these doctrines are being rejected by the progressive revisions of the Second Vatican Council. She fears that the new directions will lower the status of nuns in the church and effectively annul her spiritual marriage to God.