Oh My Goodness! Review: Pedaling Faith and Folly

A drone’s quiet hum gives way to a radiant sweep over the French Jura, where rolling emerald hills cradle a lone convent. In that first breath of light, Sister Béatrice twirls beneath a cloudless sky—an ode to The Sound of Music, yet tinged with something more unsettled: the fragile joy of souls adrift.

At its heart, Oh My Goodness! asks how faith and folly might collide when five Benedictine nuns sign up for a local cycling race, chasing a €25,000 prize to restore a crumbling nursing home. Their venture feels almost absurd—habits against handlebars—but beneath the slapstick spills a contemplative undercurrent: what drives us to pedal toward salvation, whether divine or earthly?

Director Laurent Tirard wraps this frothy caper in bright laughter, the pace brisk at just under ninety minutes. A swift montage of training scenes punctuates the narrative, each pratfall and sabotaged wheel delivering both comic relief and a subtle meditation on human ambition. At its core stand two forces: Mother Superior Véronique, whose hunger for triumph masks deeper longings, and young Gwendoline, whose smartphone-wielding vitality unsettles ancient traditions. In their interplay, the film hints at an existential crossroads, where duty, desire, and the absurd meet on a sun-drenched road without map or guarantee.

Cycles of Faith and Folly

Beneath sterile fluorescent lights and the faded murals of St. Mary’s nursing home, the nuns’ resolve flickers into life. Their first step through those echoing corridors—hands brushing frail shoulders—sets the stage for a collision of charity and absurdity. Confronted with peeling paint and trembling voices, they glimpse the chasm between devotion and impotence. Then comes the glint of a €25,000 prize in a local cycling race—a deus ex machina that transforms benevolence into a high-stakes sprint toward redemption.

In the opening act, we tumble alongside Sister Béatrice’s graceless attempts to master a bicycle, each comic fall teetering between slapstick glee and existential unease. The convent courtyard becomes a proving ground: littered helmets, scuffed habits, ragged prayers. Gwendoline—youth incarnate with her ceaseless tapping on a smartphone—slips into the role of reluctant mentor. Her digital world, brimming with algorithms and instant gratifications, collides violently with centuries-old ritual, revealing how progress and piety can form an uneasy tandem.

As the sisters’ confidence swells, a darker symmetry emerges: Mother Josephine’s rival convent, clad in sharp jerseys and silent scowls, arrives like an omen. Their pro-caliber cyclists roll out with military precision, turning friendly competition into an almost gladiatorial spectacle. Whoopie cushions, oil-slicked handlebars, and sabotaged spokes turn the racecourse into a labyrinth of moral compromise: at what point does zeal for a good cause dissolve into outright treachery?

Then the climax unfolds in a breathless montage across sunlit vineyards and shadowed forest glades. Flashbacks punctuate each hill conquered and each bruise earned—memory and motion entwined. When the Benedictine sisters taste victory, only to witness Josephine’s arrival at the last bend, the world tilts on its axis: triumph is provisional, faith a fragile construct.

In the final sprint, wheels spin against the weight of doubt. And though the finish line may blur, their collective heartbeat—audible in every pedal stroke—echoes a simple truth: community, in its imperfect form, might offer the truest solace.

Portraits in Habit and Hubris

Mother Superior Véronique cuts an intriguing figure—at once the embodiment of spiritual gravitas and a secret architect of her own ambitions. Valérie Bonneton infuses her with an almost tragicomic duality: the earnest supplicant yearning for divine favor, and the schemer eyeing a Vatican pilgrimage as though it were a personal coronation. In her fantasy sequences with a Pope lookalike, time seems to dilate—laughter echoes, but beneath it lies a question of authenticity. Can devotion born of self-interest ever be anything but a mirror held to a deeper void?

Then there is Gwendoline, that restless spark of youth, played by Louise Malek with a tremor of uncertainty. Her smartphone is a talisman, a lifeline to a world beyond cloister walls, and yet each notification chime seems to underscore her isolation. Observing her metamorphosis—from reluctant ingénue to the sisters’ unspoken lodestar—raises an unsettling thought: when the outsider leads, what becomes of the old order she both serves and subverts?

Guilaine Londez’s Sister Béatrice offers a softer counterpoint. Her beauty-queen past, briefly sketched in wistful flashback, feels like a whispered elegy for lost innocence. She spins on her toes beneath the open sky, evoking The Sound of Music even as it reminds us of freedom’s cruel price: each pirouette a testament to hope grappling with gravity.

Camille Chamoux’s Augustine rides in on literal and metaphorical scars—tattoos trailing stories of rebellion and grace. Witnessing her redemption through sport, one senses the flicker of Nietzsche’s will to power, transformed into a will to belonging. She is the bridge between the convent’s ancient vows and the primal delight of muscle and motion.

Opposite them stands Mother Josephine, Sidse Babett Knudsen’s portrait of icy authority. Every clipped barb recalls a shared childhood wound, as though rivalry itself has become a sacrament. Her presence sharpens the sisters’ bonds, forging solidarity in the crucible of competition.

Together, these seven lives form a fragile mosaic. The trainer’s gentle guidance, the abbot’s silent watchfulness, even the nursing home residents’ weary blessings—all converge to ask: what alchemy transmutes disparate souls into a single path of purpose?

Puppeteering the Absurd: Direction, Screenplay & Humor

Laurent Tirard wields the camera like a painter’s brush, layering pastoral panoramas and sudden chiaroscuro of human folly. His opening drone sweep over the Jura hills feels like a promise—sunlit grandeur as foil to the sisters’ clumsy quest. Yet in the very next frame, a flashback intrudes: a childhood rivalry reborn in cycling cleats. These daydream inserts—of Pope-vision fantasies—fracture the narrative, suggesting that reality and reverie share the same fragile edge.

In the hands of Cécile Larripa and Philippe Pinel, dialogue crackles with paradox. Vows of silence become chalkboard proclamations, each quip scrawled in white dust: “Let’s dope like real cyclists,” reads one sardonic line, where sacrilege and satire converge. Slapstick falls jostle against whispered wordplay—knights of the habit wielding whoopie cushions as existential talismans. The screenplay times its jokes with the precision of clockwork, yet sometimes the mechanism stalls: a gag too familiar, a pun that lands with the weight of a flat tire.

Tirard’s pacing is a delicate tightrope walk. A Rocky-style training montage soars with rhythmic urgency, only to skid into a banana-peel gag that feels almost willful in its absurdity. When the humor clicks—oil-slick sabotage or an archbishop’s impression—it opens a fissure where laughter and unease merge. At other moments, the tone slips, and one senses the absurdity’s kernel left too exposed, as though the film itself hesitates before peering into the void.

Yet for all its teetering, the comedy maintains a heartbeat of warmth. A racing bicycle becomes both chalice and burden: an instrument of salvation, yes, but also a reminder of life’s relentless motion. In these set pieces, we sense a Camus-like absurdism at play—the sisters’ faith is sincere, even if their methods border on the ludicrous. And through it all, Tirard invites us to consider: is laughter our final refuge against meaning’s collapse, or merely another form of prayer?

Canvas of Light and Sound

The camera lingers on the rolling slopes of the French Jura as if reluctant to leave beauty unexamined. Golden hour bathes each hill in quiet ecstasy, a visual hymn to nature’s indifference. Within the convent’s stone walls, lens and light conspire to reveal worn wooden beams and chipped plaster—an intimacy that suggests both sanctuary and entombment.

Costumes become silent narrators: the sisters’ grey habits, frayed at the sleeves, speak of vows etched into flesh. When they mount their bicycles, those same habits collide with neon-striped jerseys—an abrupt chromatic rupture in the pastoral palette. The ragged relics of their bikes—rust-dusted spokes, creaking chains—stand in stark counterpoint to the rival convent’s gleaming machines, where every spoke seems spun from ambition.

A jaunty accordion waltz threads through the soundtrack, lilting as if to coax laughter from the deepest gorge of despair. At moments of impact, the thud of a fall resonates like a church bell tolling—an audible reminder that each misstep carries weight beyond mere comedy. In quieter stretches, ambient birdsong and the distant murmur of prayer merge so seamlessly one wonders whether it is the score shaping the scene, or the scene summoning its score. And in those oscillations between sound and silence, we glimpse the film’s true motif: life’s fragile harmony, balanced precariously on two spinning wheels.

Echoes of Hope and Absurdity

In Oh My Goodness!, the underdog spirit emerges as a gentle rebellion—a sisterhood that pedals against its own limitations, forging community out of shared missteps. Their camaraderie, knotted together by falls and faltering prayers, suggests that solidarity is forged not in triumph but in the struggle itself. Youthful Gwendoline’s cheeky defiance collides with the convent’s centuries-old rituals, bridging generations in a single breath of collective breathlessness.

Faith here wears a playful mask. Sacred symbols become instruments of satire rather than dogma—chalices shared alongside bicycle water bottles, the vow of silence breached by mischievous chalkboard messages. This subversive creativity hums beneath every laugh, asking whether devotion must be solemn or if it can pulsing with mischief.

Redemption flickers in flashbacks of beauty-queen crowns and tattooed leather jackets. The past, once a closed chapter, opens as each sister discovers new purpose in the pedals’ relentless spin. Yet one wonders: is the charitable cause merely a narrative prop, or does it awaken genuine transformation beneath the habits’ folds?

Nostalgia glints in sweeping drone shots and the Edelweiss gag—a wink to The Sound of Music that both honors and unsettles. And when the training montage recalls the rhythmic drive of classic sports films, we sense that the most profound victories may lie not at the finish line, but in the reverberations of a shared heartbeat.

Epilogue of Wheels and Whimsy

Oh My Goodness! drifts between buoyant delight and structural thinness. Its ensemble warmth—each sister’s earnest spark—elevates moments of genuine connection, even as the central premise sometimes feels like a paper-thin scaffold for spectacle. When the film soars, it is in the alchemy of shared laughter; when it stalls, it reminds us how swiftly lightheartedness can tip into triviality.

This caper suits those who seek gentle amusement over gut-wrenching drama. Sunday-matinee dreamers, fans of slapstick underdogs, and anyone who finds solace in communal folly will embrace its charms. But viewers hunting for philosophical depth or searing satire may find its edges too rounded, its ambitions modest.

Rooted in affectionate homage and buoyed by spirited performances, the film balances its nods to The Sound of Music and sports-film tropes with enough fresh beats to sustain a cheerful spin. Its scenic vistas, mischievous gags, and human warmth make it a lightweight yet satisfying journey.

Full Credits

Director: Laurent Tirard

Writers: Cécile Larripa, Philippe Pinel, Laurent Tirard

Producers: Olivia Lagache

Cast: Valérie Bonneton, Camille Chamoux, Claire Nadeau, Sidse Babett Knudsen, Guilaine Londez, Louise Malek, François Morel

Director of Photography: Éric Blanckaert

Editors: Anne-Sophie Bion, Sahra Mekki

Composer: Mathieu Lamboley