THE 13TH DAY

 The problem with most religious films is that the filmmakers have a habit of equating religion with piety and piety with gross sentimentality. There is also usually a surfeit of kind priests and nice nuns being kind and nice to beatific children or else they will be about Jesus, saints and miracles and the inexplicable. Perhaps the most famous religious movie about sainthood is "The Song of Bernadette" with an unlikely Jennifer Jones as Saint Bernadette. That turned out to be so much better than it might have been, not free from piety but very well written, directed and acted.

Of course Lourdes, where many Christians, or at least Catholics, believe the Blessed Virgin appeared to Bernadette Soubirous, is probably the most famous place of pilgrimage in Christianity outside of Israel. Fatima, where a similar apparition is said to have happened in 1917, is less well known. The movie "The Miracle of Fatima" was a decent enough attempt to deal with those events and now we have "The 13th Day", a kind of amateur docu-drama about what happened at Fatima. Co-directed by Dominic and Ian Higgins it comes across as something commissioned by the Catholic Church purely for Catholics, (it certainly won't win any converts), and is acted by a cast of non-professionals.

The amazing thing is it, too, is nowhere near as bad as it could have been though it's certainly no "Song of Bernadette". Stylistically it's closer to Rossellini's "The Flowers of St. Francis" but without the rigor or the beauty that Rossellini brought to his subject and what passes for acting certainly lets it down. Non-believers will either avoid the film like the plague or will see it as nothing more than Catholic propaganda while believers might find it closer to a demonic horror movie than a tale of future saints. Shot mostly in monochrome with colour inserts it's well enough made but unlikely to appeal to all but the very few.