Movie Review: ‘The Apparition’

Review by Caitlin Zeigler

Jacques Mayano (Vincent Lindon) is a journalist, who was recently injured covering a war story. Unfortunately, he lost his colleague and it made him want to take a break from everything. He was planning to take that break until he received a phone call, where he couldn’t find out the details of his possible next job until he visited the Vatican. When Jacques arrives, he finds out that they want him to do an unbiased investigation about a young woman named Anna (Galatéa Bellugi). Anna is said to have witnessed an apparition of the Virgin Mary and Jacques is supposed to lead a team from the Vatican to check the validity of the claim.

Jacques doesn’t believe any of it, but he leads his team and looks for answers. He tries to get close to Anna, but Father Père Borrodine (Patrick d’Assumçao) is very protective of her. Anna decided to let Jacques in and find out more about her. While looking into Anna’s past, Jacques may have found out something startling in the form of a friend of Anna’s named Mériem (Alicia Hava). When Jacques completes his investigation, he finds out Anna’s claim might be true and also untrue. Jacques started defending the treatment of Anna possibly as a way to cope with his own pain, but he also experienced things that were unexplainable.

This film has a great cast, but the plot takes a long time to build up to tell you what happens. The film is almost 2 and a half hours, so some people might not want to wait to find out all of the pieces of the puzzle. It tries to show you that even a person without faith can find something positive again, but you don’t strongly feel like it’s faith that Jacques finds. It’s well-written for the most part, but it still feels like it’s missing something. I feel like I was expecting Jacques to have a life-changing experience, but he just accepts what happens and goes back to the way things were.