STONKS

what gets me about this scene is the "again" in the "felt like a priest again" because we truly never see jud get to be or feel like a priest like this at all during this entire story. when was the last time he really felt "it"? what is "it" to him? he's always on the defense, always trying to right some wrong until he gets to talk to blanc. even before coming to chimney rock.

sure the "duty" aspect of priesthood that he's been neglecting due to constantly being in crisis mode hits him full-force here and makes him have a guilt-spiral into having hallucinations and confessing to crimes he didn't commit:

but he doesn't get to feel the real "it" again until:

and it's blanc guiding him back to priesthood, into taking confession and even talking him through giving last rites. it's all blanc.

Mališa, otherwise known as Little One, is a pet pigeon owned by a conservative butler of the Austro-Hungarian aristocracy. She is loved, and she is pampered— until her owner is murdered in cold blood, and she is left to fend for herself in Sarajevo.

In the wilds of the city, she feeds from the poor, working nationalist radicals, and the vieux riches alike.

To Mališa, there are no ethical concerns. No politics. No burgeoning nationalism.

Being a priest matters to him deeply, yes. It gives shape to his need to help, to protect, to be useful in a world that was never particularly gentle with him. But underneath the collar and the duty and the ritual, there is still just a man who nurtures people’s souls by instinct. A man who chooses softness over and over again.

And I think that choice matters.

Because Jud didn’t grow up wrapped in love. He didn’t become kind because kindness was handed to him freely. If anything, he became kind in spite of the absence of it. Like he looked at all the emptiness he came from and decided, very quietly, that it would end with him.

That’s what makes him so compelling to me. His tenderness never feels effortless or naive. It feels deliberate. Earned. Like every gentle thing he does is an act of defiance against the life that shaped him.

From what we know, it’s possible that Jud only had a middle school education. I mean the guy is clearly very intelligent, so you'd assume he graduated high school and college but there's no way 17 year old Jud was in full time education surrounded by adults doing their jobs correctly.

We don’t know a lot about Jud’s upbringing but the stuff we do know is very telling about his family.  I think it’s safe to say that Jud was abused as a child. Between glaringly obvious signs of hypervigilance and the fact Jud’s parents are never mentioned at all, we can just assume this is a fact.

It’s possible that Jud’s parents didn’t directly abuse him but were complicit in someone else abusing him. It would make sense if he started boxing as a way to cope with parental neglect at home, but he talks about being a boxer like it was something he had to do to survive, as if he did it for money or protection, rather than for sport.

Maybe he was in full time education, but he got kicked out/ran away from home at 15/16. If that was the case, I think his high school would've caught on to that immediately and he would've been put in care. But his line about addiction implies he was living on the streets at that time.

Whatever the source of the abuse was, you could reasonably assume that Jud was put into a majorly traumatic situation as a child, and it led him down a path of violence as a teen. I mean, a guy doesn’t become the primary suspect in a highly publicised murder case without at least one call from his parents unless they’re dead or very bad people.

All of this is to say that I think he probably didn’t go to high school. If there were any responsible adults in his life, they should’ve easily noticed he was in such a dangerous situation. Because from what we know, Jud has a history of lashing out and teen Jud was not exactly in control of his violent outbursts.

At the end of the day, it seems like Jud never had anyone defending him when he was defenceless. He collapses in the church and prays that Jesus will show him a way through the Good Friday murders because the only consistent love Jud has ever known is through religion and Christ’s love.

With no loving parents in the picture, the only time he ever gets attention is when he’s done something terrible (“Jesus loves me when I’m guilty”). It explains his gravitation towards Catholicism and it explains why he is so caught off guard when Blanc not only believes that Jud is innocent (despite all the evidence) but sincerely offers to help him.

I mean the line that I think of first is “A kid dies in this movie.”

Which I suspect to horror fans is shorthand for “The director of this movie subverts horror tropes (wherein kids are usually immune to the monster/slasher/source of terror) to make something that is deliberately shocking. Seeing a child character die in this story is not a happy thing or a good thing, but for a horror story emphasizes that nobody is immune to the source of the terror, which makes the horror more serious and scarier.”