Locarno Film Festival 2022: ‘Serviam – I Will Serve’ (Concorso Internazionale) | Review
Ruth Mader creates an unsettling environment using the backdrop of religion and young females in her latest, Serviam – I Will Serve.
As the title suggest, Serviam, latin for “I will serve” uses the meaning in a predictable, yet engrossing way through three female children and one adult nun in Ruth Mader’s terrorizing, Serviam – I Will Serve You, in competition at the Locarno Film Festival. As Locarno appointed Giorna Nazzaro in 2021, the festival would veer towards a more genre and audience friendly festival. In 2021, the festival still remained true to its arthouse and free-spirited cinema, by showcasing the expansive A New Old Play and genre Leopard winner Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash. Though that year, my favorite feature, The Sacred Spirit, mixes arthouse tropes with a genre sensibility, Ruth Mader’s Serviam, was similar in that sense, adding a petrifying external atmosphere. With religion being the main subject of genre films, horror is the play, and in Serviam, Mader balances out not only religious beliefs, but human nature through the spoken word.
Serviam, an all-girl private Catholic boarding school houses young female students during primary school. The film focuses on three children, in the following order, Martha, Sandy, and Sabine. The students are led by the head sister nun, who strictly plays favorites in order of faith and ridicules the careless. Martha torments Sandy for being dirty by not showering, while follows secret orders from the sister nun who plays favorites to the point of harming oneself. Sandy, the outlier, doesn’t clean herself, take communion, or socialize with the other girls, freeing herself from this (cultish) system. Sabine, the middle ground of the two lightly participates in the school’s various activities from band activities to church services, acting as the true neutral of the characters. Lastly, the nun, who’s intimidating behavior strikes a certain perception equivalent to each of the main girls’ views.
Although the story may seem replicated and retold throughout religious films, Mader creates an eerie tension throughout, using a single location, the boarding school building. The multistory building location is used to its advantage to create suspense, secrets, and tightness within the film. When a certain floor is forbidden to the students, the film launches itself into a horror film solely from the use of location. The convention of nearly all women in this film present an idea of God as the only man. A setting where women are the only ones to communicate, influence, and interact to build ideas of the world. Along with location, dialogue is used to a minimum. This may be due to its certain subject matter, where religion contains prayers and little socializing, but the interactions between these characters are motivated by their use of gestures and framing devices.
In Mader’s structuring of the film, each character’s inevitable end comes to a closing, all related to their character’s stronghold faith in some religious symbolic fashion. To give oneself to the lord, or serve them at all cost, it is a wonder and questionable what and why we put our faith into something whether tangible or not, holy or evil. The psychological element that Mader presents, especially to young children, questions religious institutions, but more importantly faith and influence. In Serviam, the service towards a higher belief can cause irrational thinking leading to madness, a subject that has been explored throughout film, but Mader’s subtle and uncanny atmosphere allows a special evil to intrude and serve.
