Hana Jušić stepped before a small audience at a Hollywood screening room this week for a THR Presents conversation about her sophomore feature, "God Will Not Help," Croatia's submission to the international feature race and a film that keeps refusing to sit still in any single genre. The 137-minute drama, which opened in Croatian theaters on November 27, 2025, arrives on the awards circuit carrying a 7.3 rating on TMDb and a reputation as one of the more formally adventurous titles in this year's international field.
At the center of the story is Teresa, played by Chilean actress Manuela Martelli, a woman who turns up in the early 20th century at a remote and rigidly ordered settlement of Croatian shepherds. She says she is the widow of a man from the community who emigrated and died abroad. Whether that claim is true is a question the film lets hang, and it is the hinge on which the entire narrative turns. Her presence unsettles the community's internal hierarchy, stirs conflict among its men, and, in a development Jušić traced back to her own research, gives the settlement's women something they had not previously allowed themselves: the idea that a different life might be possible.
The director described the project as one that began with an image and a setting rather than a plot, and said the isolation of the mountain world was essential to the story she wanted to tell. The film's genres are listed as drama, thriller, romance and mystery, a combination Jušić did not treat as a marketing problem. She told the audience that she resisted pressure to clarify Teresa's backstory, preferring to preserve the ambiguity that keeps viewers leaning forward.
A Cast Drawn From Several Cinemas
Martelli, a Chilean actress, anchors the film as an outsider among the shepherds, and Jušić said the casting was deliberate: she wanted a performer who would read as foreign to the community on screen the way Teresa does within the story. Around her, the film assembles an ensemble that includes Ana Marija Veselčić as Milena, Filip Đurić as Ilija, Mauro Ercegović Gracin as Nikola, Nikša Butijer as Stanko, Tina Orlandini as Đuka, Bogdan Farcaș as Marko and Ivan Skoko as Krste. Jušić praised the group's willingness to work in demanding outdoor conditions and said the ensemble's chemistry was a large part of why the film's claustrophobia lands.
The Q&A also touched on the film's Croatian-language production and its path to the Oscars. Jušić has been traveling with the movie through festival and industry screenings, and she acknowledged that the international feature category rewards films that can be summarized in a sentence, something "God Will Not Help" deliberately makes difficult.
A Slow-Burn Contender in a Crowded Race
The film's release timing, late November 2025, positioned it for a domestic awards push before the current season, and its selection as Croatia's entry has kept it in the conversation alongside a crowded field of international submissions. Jušić did not make predictions about the race, and the conversation stayed focused on craft. She spoke at length about the sound design and about the decision to keep the camera close to the women in the settlement as the community's order begins to fracture.
"God Will Not Help" runs just over two hours and 15 minutes, an unusual length for a film built on restraint, and Jušić said she never considered trimming it. The pacing, she explained, is part of the argument the movie makes about time and about how slowly change arrives in a place that has decided to stop changing. For audiences, that means a film that asks for patience and rewards it with a portrait of a community under pressure from within.
With the international feature race still taking shape, "God Will Not Help" remains one of the season's more distinctive entries, a Croatian-language mystery with a Chilean lead and a director unwilling to explain her own ending. Jušić closed the Q&A by saying she hopes viewers leave the theater arguing with each other about Teresa, which, she suggested, is exactly the point.
Source: Hollywood Reporter
