‘Citizen Saint’ Review: A Nightmarishly Handsome Allegory for the Destructive Power of Faith

variety.com:

Jessica Kiang There is an old joke about a pious man stranded on a desert island. As he prays for divine deliverance, a ship arrives, but he sends it away, saying, “God will save me.” Ditto a helicopter and eventually a seaplane.

The man dies, to his surprise, and when he gets to heaven, asks God why he did not save him. God replies, “Look, man, I sent a ship, a helicopter and a seaplane…” If the moral of this old chestnut were hewn from the craggy quarries of a benighted Georgian mining village, and carved in strikingly gorgeous black-and-white cinematography, it might look a little like “Citizen Saint,”  Tinatin Kajrishvili’s somber, scabrous third film, in which a rural community refuses to accept a God who moves in anything but the most mysterious ways.

Departing from the low-key naturalism of her two prior features “Brides” and “Horizon,” here Kajrishvili moves into an overtly allegorical register, with Krum Rodriguez’s exceptional lensing bringing dystopian grandeur to the scrubby plains and rocky terrains of the remote Georgian countryside.

The hillsides in this region are scarred with pit openings and dotted with rusting bulldozers, and there’s even a weatherbeaten iron monorail that delivers granite-faced workers deep into the bowels of the local mine.