Film Review: Serviam – Ich Will Dienen (Serviam – I Will Serve)
by Rose Finlay

SERVIAM – ICH WILL DIENEN (SERVIAM – I WILL SERVE)
Ruth Mader, Austria 2022

The Serviam boarding school for the daughters of the Austrian elite seems on paper to be the perfect choice. There are many different activities and a good education on offer, so long as the girls don’t go to the top two floors of the building. Those floors are off-limits. When a young nun goes too far while spiritually educating and an awkward student is peer pressured into breaking the rules, the façade of the school quickly comes tumbling down.

Part art house, part traditional thriller, SERVIAM – ICH WILL DIENEN tries to cover a lot of bases and instead is rather disjointed. The set-up is slow as we are introduced to the school; the aging nuns (with one exception) pray, bored students attend mass, one father removes his daughter from school without context in a surreal, misogynistic monologue. The overall effect is unsettling, but the film settles into a more comfortable thriller atmosphere towards the second half when the stakes are revealed.

Set in the 1980s, SERVIAM – ICH WILL DIENEN certainly is a rather obvious nod to the Nunsploitation subgenre. The inherent criticism of the Catholic Church’s long history of abuse in their schools is the main theme, but unfortunately with the backdrop of a thriller, it comes off as too fantastically evil to really be the gut-punch it should be. Instead, the film is a composite of caricatures: a bad nun, a bad boarding school, and a bad Catholic church. These exaggerations give a distinct anti-Catholic feel, rather than any meaningful criticism of the real horrors of such institutions. While in Austria anti-Catholicism may not be a concern, films tend to have a reach far beyond the borders of only one country, and SERVIAM – ICH WILL DIENEN is not adroit enough to surpass its exploitative nature.