A palpable parable about an impostor priest, CORPUS CHRISTI is Polish picture making at its most impressive.

CORPUS CHRISTI examines the distinct difference between being an impostor, and being a fraud.

CORPUS CHRISTI is the story of 20 year old Daniel, who has served time in a youth detention facility, befriended the prison padre, and desires to enter the seminary to study for the priesthood after release from incarceration.

His past impedes his entrance into Holy Orders, however, (so much for Christian forgiveness and the social ideal rehabilitation) and his release damns him to a kind of servitude in a rural sawmill.

Arriving in the backwater, a case of mistaken identity promptly installs him in the presbytery, a liturgical locum as the parish priest departs to partake in a bit of detox.

Blessed with an authentic charisma, Daniel goes about tending his flock and mending its fractures. His credentials may be fake but his vocation is genuine. The congregation is stimulated by his innate honesty, as he instills a belief in basic faith, hope and charity.

Apostolic rather than proselytizing, Daniel’s empathy is the pathway into his parishioners sorrows rather than extracts from epistles and glib gospel gobbledy gook.

But just as Jesus had to contend with the Pharisees, Daniel has to confront those who would tear down his ministry, and destiny fixes a date for his own Golgotha.

Bartosz Bielenia is mesmerising as Daniel, depicting a brutal beauty, the incarnation of the verisimilitude to true vocation as opposed to dog collared dogma of tick the box training.

Director Jan Komasa and screenwriter Mateusz Pacewicz have worked a movie miracle in CORPUS CHRISTI, depicting a priest whose pastoral care is wholly human, a truly holy communion with his congregation, not tethered to sanctimonious theology, the word made flesh.

A blistering saws and holy fire soundtrack by Evgueni and Sasha Galperin makes this journey from purgatory to paradise and back again indelible.