This true story of a French Catholic priest who was allowed to abuse children over three decades and the Church’s attempt to hush it up has a hard-won integrity and a quiet sense of indignation.

By the Grace of God
Director: François Ozon

This true story of a French Catholic priest who was allowed to abuse children over three decades and the Church’s attempt to hush it up has a hard-won integrity and a quiet sense of indignation. It’s a crusading film that has been compared to the Oscar-winning Spotlight (2015), about a team of Boston news journalists striving to expose a paedophile scandal in the US Catholic Church. By the Grace of God takes a different angle by focusing upon the victims of the abuse, which is at once a strength and a shortcoming. The real-life victims and their families are at last paid the honour of the truth being told, but its impact is weakened by the handling of tone and form. 

François Ozon, a prodigious and versatile director better known for thrillers, comedies and melodramas, addresses the story with a proper moral seriousness. The film opens in Lyon, 2014, when a 40-year-old lawyer and Catholic family man named Alexandre (Melvil Poupaud) learns that Bernard Preynat, a Catholic priest who abused him as a boy at Scout camp, is still working with children in the diocese. Outraged, Alexandre makes a formal complaint to Cardinal Barbarin (François Marthouret), who professes concern but quietly contrives to bury the matter in a pit of bureaucracy. This first section is couched largely in epistolary form, hinting at Ozon’s original conception of the film as a documentary; as it proceeds one might wish he had stuck to it.

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