God Will Not Help (2025) ‘Locarno’ Movie Review: Bristling Study of Gendered Power Thrives in Gaps

Hana Jušić’s intensely atmospheric drama “God Will Not Help” (2025) opens at night. Darkness brings a stranger descending on a patch of Croatian desolation. The Chilean Teresa (Manuella Martelli) brings sad tidings to Milena (Ana Marija Veselčić) about her brother Marko. Though both are alien to each other’s languages, Teresa insists she’s the widow of Marko, who has died in an accident.

Fledgling, the two women latch onto inscriptions, carvings, symbols in thread work to strike a shared understanding. Milena shares how her family tends to leave her behind to watch over the area while they journey up the mountain with their cattle for water. Her loneliness is abated to some degree when Teresa comes in. “It’s like you fell from the sky for me”, Milena muses. But Teresa wants more. She’s looking to bury Marko’s bones, emphasising she too must trail into the depths of the mountains and meet the rest of his family.

Set in the early 20th century, the film properly kicks off at the interstices between Teresa’s singular persona and the family’s steady suspicions. The moment she finally encounters Marko’s brothers and cousins, she realises the severe patriarchy she’s up against, which doubts every movement of hers. Hana Jušić spins menace from incomprehension. Who is Teresa really? What is she hiding? Can she be sheltering something more nefarious than she lets on? Her presence unsettles the men, posing a mystery and a threat.

She’s something they can’t pin down, unlike the other women in their lives. Teresa evades easy, clearly legible access, a woman ferociously independent and assertive about what she wants and how she’ll have that. This vision of pure, unbridled agency stands in stark contrast to models of womanhood that the men are habituated to bossing over, trampling, and manipulating. Teresa is a startling aberration, and Martelli summons an unbreakable steeliness. She’s stern-faced and wouldn’t blink twice before showing a man his petty corner.

Teresa makes it evident that she cannot be challenged or dismissed as quickly as others would like. As opposed to the community’s women, she moves beyond the peripheral, demanding her strength and fortitude be viewed with equal vigour. She won’t tolerate condescension. Battling aspersions and firm reservations, she seems haunted herself. As night falls, she’s plagued by hovering visions of Marko.

God Will Not Help (2025) — A still from “God Will Not Help” (2025)

This wind-ruffled, ragged drama brims with latent anxieties, stifled desires, and insecurities just about to bob above the surface. The community flinches, unnerved by the sight of a woman who expresses herself freely. Cinematographer Jana Plećaš shoots the towering landscapes with grim authority. Each character is framed by a sprawling mountainous expanse. Nature seems to play as operatic and lingering in dread as this tale of an outsider–a straying woman–who catalyses a self-recognition in women, fear in men, which they cannot quite square up to.

Milena is used to being looked past by her family. Teresa emboldens her as she also brings levity to the other women. “God Will Not Help” swings into religiously stoked paranoia around the devil, which is often conveniently attributed to disobedient women. The deviants are branded witches. Teresa lashes out at this imposing image, even as she draws out repressed vulnerability from the men, especially getting Ilija to open up. He baulks, before intimacy creeps in.

Amidst a stunning, bleak, primal civilisation, Jušić distils dialogue–its lack and misconceptions—into individual reappraisals. People might ascribe all sorts of meaning and intentionality to Teresa without even reaching what she’s truly conveying. There’s obviously ample cultural difference, those of social ritual, which the brothers are pressing upon Teresa, and which she also pushes back. In each, she unlocks something raw and naked.

Their innermost recesses bubble up, though how much they’ll let it prevail differs. “God Will Not Help” builds moody, forlorn, and tense undercurrents from a band of men expecting every woman to unquestioningly fall in line. Jušić is a director in sharp control of an ensemble that provokes one another while grappling with Teresa. The uncertain, volatile mix of feelings and misgivings is where “God Will Not Help” will have you rapt, hanging onto sneaking glances.