Novitiate

Novitiate (2017) is writer-director Margaret Betts's feature debut — stream it online on iFILM. Margaret Qualley plays Cathleen, a young woman who enters a convent in the early 1960s driven by genuine faith rather than family expectation.

She arrives just as the Second Vatican Council begins reshaping centuries of Catholic practice. The Reverend Mother — Melissa Leo, severe and privately terrified — fights both Rome's directives and the restlessness stirring in her novices. Between Cathleen's internal struggle with faith, physical denial, and desire she has no language to name, and the institution's slow fracture, the film holds both without collapsing either into the other.

Shown at Sundance 2017, the film moves at a pace that mirrors convent life. It trusts the viewer to sit with discomfort. Watch Novitiate online on iFILM.