Image by Marcos Cola from Pixabay
Catholic School is hard to recommend because of how disturbing the subject matter is. This is a movie that is based on real events, and it doesn’t hold back on trying to make its audience uncomfortable. If you have any kind of trauma, from either sexual or physical abuse, don’t watch this movie. It doesn’t show any of the violent bits, but the implications are still difficult to sit through.
Catholic School follows the events that lead up to 1975’s gruesome Circeo massacre in Rome in which three boys from a prestigious catholic school kidnapped, tortured, and murdered two young women. The movie will jump around the different students of the class, showing how the pressures and trauma in their lives slowly shaped them. The film does a deep dive at all the students, not just the ones that committed the atrocities. In doing so, the film aims to show the importance of mental health and how simply ignoring the problems doesn’t fix them.
I wouldn’t watch this movie for fun because this isn’t a fun movie. It is difficult to have to sit through the family drama and the traumatizing events at the end of this film. It is harder to sit through knowing that this is based on real events. Knowing and seeing the atrocities that man is capable of is always a difficult experience. I will be watching cartoons to try to get through the sorrow I’m overcome with because of this movie.
This movie does a good job of showing how people deal with trauma, and how this trauma affects a person. The problem is this movie takes a long time to get to the point. You jump around between each classmate, learning of his troubled home life to get a bit of perspective, but this gets old and repetitive. I understand that the intention was to show how the pressures of society shape young people, but it does so too slowly. It feels much more like filler, wasting the social commentary it is trying to make. This movie suffers for its artistic choices.
This movie is available for streaming on Netflix, but be warned; this isn’t an entertaining movie. It is a hard look at a horrible event. It isn’t for everyone, and I would skip it.
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Thanks for the warning.
Thanks for reading. Yeah, I don’t want people to get triggered by going into this blind.
Informative
Thanks for reading!
Interesting movie.The Catholic church sure has commited many crimes. We had a case of sexual abuse by priests and a bishop in our country. A major operation was launched. This was in Belgium. The bishop sits well provided in a french monastery. He got off well. The others were just placed in different parishes.
This one focuses more on the murders and the pathology of the boys. It does make some comments about how despite the boys being from good catholic homes, they still did horrible stuff. I agree though, the Catholic church has committed a lot of crimes. I was raised Catholic and don’t really follow the religion anymore because its hard to respect the hypocrisy. Thanks for reading!