Little Trouble Girls Review: Desire in a Convent Choir

Is Little Trouble Girls good?

Yes — Little Trouble Girls is an exceptionally assured debut, backed by a 98 Critic Score and a strong 78 Metascore. Urška Djukić directs with a confidence that belies a first feature, favoring glances and silences over exposition. The gap down to a 72 Audience Score and a more modest 6.6 on IMDb suggests general viewers want more forward momentum than critics did, but the consensus is clear: this is one of the year’s most quietly powerful coming-of-age films.

What is Little Trouble Girls about?

It’s the story of a shy teenager whose first stirrings of desire surface during a convent choir retreat, set against the strict order of Catholic school life. Sixteen-year-old Lucia, pushed into her school’s all-girls choir by her mother, forms an intense friendship with Ana-Maria, an older and more popular student. When the choir travels together for the retreat, the close quarters and rigid routine turn an ordinary teenage friendship into something more charged, and the film spends its runtime tracing that shift without ever naming it outright.

Should you watch Little Trouble Girls?

Yes, if you’re drawn to patient, atmospheric coming-of-age dramas rather than plot-driven ones. With a 3.4 average on Letterboxd and a runtime of 130 minutes, this is a film that rewards attention to mood and performance over incident — the kind of movie where a shared look across a choir loft carries more weight than any line of dialogue. Viewers looking for a faster-paced or more overtly dramatic story about adolescence may find the deliberate pacing tests their patience, which likely explains the softer audience numbers next to the near-unanimous critical praise.

How does Little Trouble Girls compare to Portrait of a Lady on Fire?

Djukić’s film shares clear DNA with Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire — both are restrained, female-directed studies of desire blooming inside a closed, rule-bound environment, and both trust silence and composition to do the emotional work that dialogue might otherwise carry. Where Sciamma’s film unfolds against an isolated coastal estate and an explicit painter-subject relationship, Djukić works in the more claustrophobic, communal setting of a school choir, where every gesture is witnessed by peers and chaperones alike. The Slovenian setting and contemporary Catholic-school backdrop also give Little Trouble Girls a more institutional, disciplinary undertone than the period romance of Sciamma’s film — less a forbidden affair than a quiet negotiation between personal longing and communal conformity. Fans of that earlier film, or of Lucrecia Martel’s work in a similar register, will find a lot to recognize here.