11/08/2025 - Hana Jušić's second feature is a striking, rich work that tells a period family story containing surprising elements, and with some original and accomplished technical contributions

In her second feature, God Will Not Help, which has just world-premiered in Locarno's main competition, Croatian director Hana Jušić travels away in time, but not in space, from her remarkable debut, Quit Staring at My Plate [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Hana Jušić
film profile]. It is another family story, albeit a horror-tinged one, about people as rough as the mountains they come from and women's position in this patriarchal pattern.

Set in the early 20th century in Dalmatian Zagora, western Croatia, the film surprises us with its main character. Teresa (Chilean actress Manuela Martelli) arrives in the piedmont where an extended shepherd family lives in simple stone houses. As the men are up in the heights with the sheep, she encounters Milena (Ana Marija Veselčić), the only sister in the family of three brothers. Wearing a black Edward dress, as sported by urban women of the time, and speaking Spanish, Teresa seems like an apparition for the simple rural woman.

Jušić discards the cinematic convention by which characters who speak different languages suddenly understand each other, and this both infuses the film with tension and underlines one of its main themes: the difficulty of communication. It's not just that no one understands Teresa; the other characters can hardly understand each other, even if they do all speak Croatian. This is due to emotional closedness in such families, stemming from the brutality of the living conditions, and the strict and poorly understood religious mores.

Using illustrations in a prayer book, Teresa manages to explain to Milena that she is the widow of her eldest brother, Marko, who went far away – we gather it's to Chile, where there was a gold rush at the time. She has brought his bones to bury them, and to take care of her part of the sheep and land. The two women strike up a fraught but increasingly closer relationship, before the men return.

The youngest brother (Marko Ercegović Gracin) promptly greets his sister by shouting and hitting her for letting his dog off the chain. Then, together with their cousins (including another woman and a few small children), arrives Ilija (Filip Djurić, also seen this year in How Come It's All Green Out Here? [+see also:
film review
interview: Nikola Ležaić
film profile]), who turns out to be an unexpectedly open-minded and spiritual man, an enigma for the others. He and Teresa are mirrored, with the former being a kind of savant saint figure and the latter soon being perceived as a witch – especially after a phantasmagorical nighttime scene, when a wolf appears in her vicinity.

A couple of such haunting sequences and illustrations in the prayer book, which become increasingly eerie, are an arresting addition and contrast in the picture, courtesy of DoP Jana Plećaš, whose shots convey this huge space consisting of vast, blue sky and rocky hills, where human figures are often just dots. Meanwhile, Teresa in her black dress, trudging over the rocks and grass, reveals Victorian influences. At times, Jušić puts us in a sort of trance, for which the 138-minute running time certainly allows, by panning the camera away from characters who deliver monologues that the other person will not understand, and illustrating them with striking and often truly creepy figures and objects. The score by Stavros Evangelou, Iris Asimakopoulou and Vasilis Chontos harks back to Tangerine Dream's sweeping, pulsating electronics, an unexpected and highly effective contribution to the film's tone.

God Will Not Help is a rich and remarkable film, and even if it's not the easiest watch, it commands attention and respect. It is a co-production between Croatia's Kinorama, Italy's Nightswim, Romania's Microfilm, Greece's Horsefly Films, France's Maneki Films and Slovenia's Perfo. New Europe Film Sales handles the international rights.