Mary Magdalene review: the Bible's fallen woman takes the lead in a chic, thought-provoking retelling

Dir: Garth Davis; Starring: Rooney Mara, Joaquin Phoenix, Tahar Rahim, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Denis Ménochet, Hadas Yaron, Ariane Labed. PG cert, 95 mins

Mary Magdalene is something of a milestone in Biblical cinema: it must be the first Life-of-Christ film that could plausibly double as a mood board for a Scandi chic living room. Peasant life in early first-century Judeaea may have been a hardscrabble business, but in Garth Davis’s film it is also a fantastically tasteful one, playing out on a delicate palette of raffia and stone, Instagram-perfect coastlines, and traditionally embroidered cloaks and headscarves, designed by the great Jacqueline Durran, that look like the best Etsy finds you’ll ever make. 

I say this not to poke fun, but to explain the very particular level on which it’s easiest to engage with Davis’s ambitious new film – an unexpectedly austere, solemn follow-up to Lion, his no less refined but far more open-hearted 2016 debut. Unlike Lion’s true-life adoption story, Mary Magdalene neither breaks your heart nor grabs your throat.

Instead, it goes straight for the forehead: it is a brow-furrower and a temple-rubber, best mulled over at a remove. It also features the final completed soundtrack by the tremendously talented Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, who previously crafted the scores for Arrival, Sicario and The Theory of Everything, among others, and died last month at the too-young age of 48. Jóhannsson’s circling, astral compositions, co-written here with the cellist Hildur Guðnadóttir, bring a spiritual quality to the project that its other component parts don’t quite muster up.

Not that it sets out to be overtly spiritual – or overtly anything else, for that matter, which makes it harder to warm to than its best known cousins, Pier Paolo Pasoini’s noble, rough-hewn The Gospel According to St Matthew and Martin Scorsese’s incendiary The Last Temptation of Christ.

Mary Magdalene sets out to retrace Christ’s ministry from its title character’s perspective, recognising her as his unsung 13th apostle in the process, while rebuffing the persistent myth, first put about by Pope Gregory in 591, that she was a repentant prostitute. 

Played by Rooney Mara with an alabaster stillness, Mary starts out as just another young woman from the Magdala fishing community, albeit one with no appetite for the arranged marriage her elder brother (Denis Menochet) has set up.

“It would please God for you to become a mother,” he mutters darkly: in this community, God’s wishes seem to be conveniently in tandem with those of the menfolk, plus the assumed desires of any female ancestors who are no longer around to speak for themselves. When Mary gets cold feet, she is dragged down to the beach for a midnight exorcism, and the only man who can draw her out of her subsequent torpor is a strange travelling preacher, played by Mara’s real-world beau Joaquin Phoenix, with a beard like gorse and a high and husky voice. 

This is – spoiler alert – Jesus Christ himself, and as Mary attends to his message she falls platonically head-over-heels, and soon abandons her village for life on the road with his small band of followers, in various states of Galilean bedragglement. Phoenix’s look, manner and accent all suggest a Californian New Age cult leader – and the way in which the actor makes his sermons sound as if they’re tumbling unbidden out of his head has a prickly supernatural force.

There is also a pervasive sense that trouble is brewing, and some scenes you might expect to feel a little routine – from the resurrection of Lazarus to the cleansing of the Temple in Jerusalem have an uneasy charge that throws these familiar scenarios off-balance. But they also repeatedly nudge Mary into the margins of what has been billed until now as her story, and it takes the crucifixion to make her fully interesting again.

Where Helen Edmundson and Philippa Goslett’s screenplay really strikes gold is in its fresh spin on Judas Iscariot. Superbly played by Tahar Rahim, this version of the 12th disciple is no treacherous wolf but a wide-eyed fanboy undergoing a crisis of faith, whose betrayal of his idol is framed as a desperate attempt to force his hand.

If he is who he says he is, surely he can free himself from the Romans’ clutches, hastening on this new kingdom he has had so much to say about? And if he isn’t – well, the consequences are no less than he deserves. There is a neat little scene in which Mary gently suggests the disciples take a more metaphorical view of their Rabbi’s teachings: Judas urges Jesus to correct her, but he pointedly doesn’t, and the triangle of tension between them tightens in an instant. 

“You weakened him – you weakened us,” Peter (Chiwetel Ejiofor) will later furiously hiss at Mary, though the film obviously begs to differ, a point it goes on to make persuasively, if a little drily, in its closing moments. Oddly bloodless, but thought-provoking in a discussion group kind of way, it’s less successful as a film than as an exercise, but at least it’s a worthwhile one.