Novitiate

Novitiate follows Cathleen, a teenager raised by a non-religious single mother in rural Tennessee during the 1950s. Attracted to the idea of devoting her life to God, she enrols at a Catholic school on a scholarship and eventually enters a convent as a postulant. Her training unfolds in the early 1960s, against the backdrop of the Second Vatican Council, whose reforms began to alter convent life. As she moves toward becoming a nun, Cathleen wrestles with questions of faith, sexuality and obedience, and with the harsh realities of life as a servant of God.

The film is the feature debut of writer-director Margaret Betts, who also wrote the screenplay, and it precedes her second feature, The Burial, released in 2023. Margaret Qualley plays Sister Cathleen, with Melissa Leo as the Reverend Mother, Julianne Nicholson as Cathleen's mother Nora, and Dianna Agron, Lisa Stewart and Morgan Saylor among the supporting cast.

Released in October 2017, the drama runs 123 minutes. A critics' rating of 7.3 out of 10 from 107 reviews places it above the audience scores of 6.7 on IMDb from 5,800 votes and 6.5 on TMDB from 192 votes, indicating that reviewers responded to it more warmly than general viewers did.