Beginning

Beginning opens with a sermon on the Old Testament tale of Abraham and Isaac, delivered to a Jehovah’s Witness congregation in Georgia’s predominantly Orthodox Christian Caucasus region. Just as the preacher, David (Rati Oneli), starts to expound on its implications regarding belief, the Kingdom Hall is firebombed by unseen attackers, transforming the becalmed sanctuary into a hellish crucible. Taken together with the scene’s violent shift and director Dea Kulumbegashvili’s already evident fixed-frame aesthetic, this invocation of Abraham’s radical leap of faith, which spans the breach between murder and sacrifice, might seem to presage an exploration of religious experience, or a sociocultural study of religious prejudice. But in Kulumbegashvili’s consummately composed feature debut, faith isn’t so much the central subject as it is, well, a beginning—the starting point for a film…