The Novice
2017 · 4m · Estados Unidos
Directed by Alejandra Alvarez, Courtney Brianna Scriven
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, tender
A young monk learns the value of patience and how to ignore distractions.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A meditation on monastic discipline sounds like the kind of earnest snooze everyone pretends to understand, but Alvarez and Scriven seem to know exactly what they're subverting—the real intrigue is whether this is sincere or a very patient deconstruction of spiritual cinema itself.
The formal restraint here speaks to a deliberate lineage—echoes of slow cinema and contemplative practice—though the risk is whether four minutes can sustain that weight or simply becomes a well-composed etude.
The decision to compress patience into four minutes, letting a single moment of distraction and its resolution carry the entire emotional arc, is the kind of constraint that forces specificity; everything hinges on whether the performance sells that internal shift without explanation.