Like two of her older sisters before her, Thérèse Martin is determined to become a Carmelite nun, even though she is officially too young to enter the order.

He has learned from Robert Bresson how to linger on an image, how to give symbolic intensity to humdrum objects, by isolating them in the frame, and gentle repetition.In The New Yorker the critic Pauline Kael wrote that:[1] Watching Thérèse is like looking at a book of photographs of respectfully staged tableaux, and not being allowed to flip the pages at your own speed.

You're trapped inside his glass bubble.The academic Mary Bryant called the film, "by far the most effective and challenging rendering of the Thérèse-event in the decade leading up to Thérèse's centenary year in 1997" … Alain Cavalier was careful at pre-production stage to immerse himself not only in data, but also in visual and atmospheric detail.

Although Cavalier did visit the Lisieux Carmel, and spoke to the sisters there, the film was not shot on location there, and makes no attempt to reproduce the recognisable architecture of that monastery.

There are no exterior shots at all in the film; instead, the presence of an extra-monastic world is conveyed obliquely, by the background cooing of a wood pigeon, or by the green, pulsating body of a tiny crouching frog, cupped in the hand of an infirmarian, and brought in to give pleasure to the dying Thérèse".