'Hadewijch' is loosely based on the poems of a 13th century female Christian mystic who lived in Belgium. Little is known of her life other than it's been deduced that she came from wealthy stock and didn't belong to a convent. Director Dumont utilizes this background to fashion a contemporary allegory of the seeker's journey to God. He begins his story with a young novice nun, Celine, being expelled from her convent for obsessive self-mortification. The young woman appears to be more disturbed and confused than a true seeker after enlightenment, and her eccentric behavior is partially explained by alienation from disinterested worldly parents after she returns to her family's palatial Parisian townhouse.
Celine begins hanging out with some working class North African Muslim men, empathizing with their religious devotion - and when she expresses her spiritual fervor in extreme terms, they start to consider her as a potential suicide bomber. A number of medieval Christians learned contemplative disciplines from Sufi mystics, and this plot device may be a metaphor for ego annihilation, while simultaneously suggesting all religions are just winding roads leading to the same God. Unfortunately 'Hadewijch' is burdened with too many ponderously slow shots and silent passages that spoil the narrative flow. Celine's story of spiritual longing and repentance might have been told more eloquently if the film had borrowed some of the conventional style of 'Vision' - a biographical account of another medieval female mystic, Hildegard von Bingen - just as that film in its turn could have used some of 'Hadewijch's' intensity and imagination.
