1926, a village in France: 16-year-old Mouchette (Sandrine Bonnaire) kills one of her lovers, the Marquis de Cadignan. The murder, however, is covered up as suicide. The Catholic village priest Donissan (Gérard Depardieu) strives to lead the life of a saint after medieval example: he fasts, wears a hair shirt beneath his cassock and scourges himself. His superior, Dean Menou-Segrais, urges the zealot to show moderation out of fatherly concern, yet he is also fascinated by the strength and fervour of the young man, in whom he believes he recognises very special gifts, if not a true vocation. On a lonely night-time walk, Donissan meets a travelling horse dealer who persuades him to take a shortcut. But the stranger only leads the exhausted priest ever deeper into the wilderness and finally reveals himself as Satan. “This rigorously formal adaptation of the novel, driven by an inner dynamic, portrays the primal drama of humankind, caught between temptation, guilt and grace, from an existentialist, agnostic perspective. It is precisely this that makes the unfashionable striving for spiritual dimensions in a godforsaken world credible, reveals the spiritual deficits of a materialistic present, and lends the subject an impressive seriousness. Superbly acted. – Worth seeing” (Lexikon des Internationalen Films)