[1] Marie, a student, works at her father's Swiss gas station and plays basketball for a local team; she claims to be a virgin and maintains a chaste relationship with her boyfriend Joseph, a taxi cab driver and college dropout.

When a passing stranger named Uncle Gabriel (who arrives by jet plane and is accompanied by a small girl who acts as his secretary) informs Marie that she will become pregnant despite remaining chaste, she is at first shocked and confused.

In a parallel narrative, Eva, a college student, gets involved with her professor, who theorizes that life on earth arose from a guided extraterrestrial intelligence.

The point of departure for the film was a book by Françoise Dolto, the popular French pediatrician and psychoanalyst, called L'Évangile au risque de la psychanalyse.

[3] Pope John Paul II criticized the film saying that it "deeply wounds the religious sentiments of believers.

"[4] Protesters showed up at some theaters on opening night, and its premiere screening at the Sydney Film Festival was disrupted by protestors and a bomb threat that caused the theatre to be evacuated.

[8] Hail Mary received mixed reviews, including one in the New York Times that characterized the film as "not especially provocative or entertaining", but also called it "an utterly serious attempt to examine the nature of relations between women and men and the possibility of profound friendships not based on sex.

This he explores through stunning images of nature and the nude figure of his heroine - the latter photographed chastely without voyeurism or sexism, after certain classic paintings.