Noomi Rapace: The Violence It Takes to Love (and Portray) Teresa

The Pathé Convention buzzed like a restless hive: the Paris premiere of Teresa, the new film by Teona Strugar Mitevska (God Exists, Her Name is Petrunya). In the audience, Noomi Rapace — a fierce presence with piercing eyes — carried a film already dividing, shaking, and cracking assumptions. First shown at the Venice Film Festival 2025, Teresa arrives in theaters on December 3, accompanied by a subtle scandal and widespread admiration.

Forged in Nordic Fire: The Birth of a Rebellious Actress

Noomi Rapace never needed a myth: she built one herself.
Born Noomi Norén, she grew up in Iceland, under that oblique light where faces become silhouettes. An actress mother (Nina Norén), a flamenco singer father often absent, and very early on, a survival instinct fueled by art.

At seven, she appears in Í skugga hrafnsins — silent, but already sharp.
At fifteen, she tears herself from her childhood, returns alone to Sweden, adopts the name “Rapace” — the bird of prey — and navigates a punk adolescence where rage became her mother tongue.

She takes on small roles until Daisy Diamond (2007), a brutal, almost exorcistic film. Then comes Lisbeth Salander — a seismic role in Millennium (2009). Piercings, fights, a sharp solitude: Rapace puts not only her body but her scars into the role. The world discovers an actress who doesn’t act: she opens, bleeds, and attacks.

Teresa: A Punk Saint, Scarred, and Relentlessly Human

In Teresa, Rapace ventures again into territory other actresses avoid.
Teona Strugar Mitevska rejects the sanitized icon. She favors flaw, tension, and vertigo.

Calcutta, 1948. Seven days.
Seven days when Teresa, still a simple nun, prepares to leave everything behind to found the Missionaries of Charity. A colonial India on the edge of collapse. A Church uneasy with a woman charting her own path without patriarchal permission.

Teresa emerges as a mystical CEO of compassion — unstoppable, regardless of convent walls or wary glances. Around her orbit two emotional poles:

Sister Agnieszka, balanced fragility
Father Friedrich, cold masculine power, willing to maintain order at all costs

The film, sometimes stylized and anachronistic, depicts Teresa as a creature constantly struggling against walls — walls of dogma, faith, and doubt. Zenithal shots transform the cross into an all-seeing, oppressive gaze.

Fifteen Years to Deconstruct a Global Myth

Teona Strugar Mitevska doesn’t just tell a story.
She dismantles, interrogates, and turns the myth inside out.

The project began fifteen years ago, with the documentary Teresa and Me. Some lines in the film come directly from interviews with the last founding sisters. This is not hagiography: it’s looking the shadows straight in the eye.

Forced baptisms, charity that verges on authoritarianism, theological ambiguities the Church would rather ignore — all is present, without provocation, without gloss.

Noomi Rapace, a “Punk Rock” Teresa Who Burns the Screen

Mitevska admits:

“I wanted raw energy, almost punk rock.”

For a year and a half, director and actress deconstructed, tightened, and rewrote everything.
The result is clear: Rapace does not play Mother Teresa. She inhabits her. She crosses her. She retains her toughness, but exposes the woman beneath. A saint who doubts, who strikes, who frightens. A mystic fighting as much against her superiors as against her own faith.

It’s a dangerous role, a tightrope act — one that can make or break a career.
Rapace turns it into a spiritual, feminist, visceral uppercut, leaving no one unshaken.

Verdict: A Knockout Film, a Scalpel-Sharp Performance

Teresa is not a film about sainthood.
It is a film about the solitude of courage.
About the violence it sometimes takes to love.
About the intimate cost of a vision.

With this role, Noomi Rapace may deliver her most radical performance since Millennium.
One certainty: on December 3, Teresa will leave no one in the theater untouched.