What distinguishes Jesse’s story is the striking way that the writer-director Ricky D’Ambrose tells it — its ellipses, voice-over, visual precision and an emotional reserve that can feel like clinical detachment but is more rightly described as an aesthetic.
D’Ambrose’s drama is attuned to how much sensitive kids keep inside, watching and holding their breath while the adults convince themselves they’re not making a mess of things.
88
Slant MagazineChuck Bowen
Slant MagazineChuck Bowen
The Cathedral is a deeply humanist film, but it’s also a relentlessly bleak exorcism of a family’s intolerances.
88
RogerEbert.comSheila O'Malley
RogerEbert.comSheila O'Malley
The Cathedral marries form to content in a striking way.
It’s an ambitious undertaking for an 87-minute film, and while this lofty aim can result in a few passages striking a bit broad, one comes away admiring D’Ambrose’s meticulously committed approach to storytelling.
With the help of blankly matter-of-fact yet omniscient voice-over narration (spoken by Madeleine James), D’Ambrose achieves the span and the depth of a cinematic bildungsroman in shards of experience and epigrammatic flickers.