[Essene] pays its attention to an Anglican religious community which on the surface has little or no connection to the urgent social and economic problems of [Wiseman's] previous films. A monastery in a rural setting—what could constitute a more radical departure from the concerns of those earlier visions of institutional inhumanity? In Essene we watch instead the rituals, routines, exchanges among a group of men committed to a life which secludes them from the deterioration of cities, the profanities of schooling, the anxieties and paralysis of so many institutional roles….

With Essene Wiseman focuses our attention on the quite specific collisions between a quite limited number of individuals. The examination of social issues in this film is not accumulated through quick-cut series of collage sequences of particulars so much as it is achieved through the close-quartered, representative drama of reconciling self-discovery and contentment with social responsibility and cooperativeness…. As Essene disengages us from the visual immediacy of a more familiar world, we come into the presence of a more freshly dramatic situation than any of [Wiseman's] other films provided….

There is strong emotion, but muted and ritualized by both the place and the persons. The group is a collection, the film makes us feel, of individuals struggling quietly to create community. The spoken word appears an awkward and weak vehicle. (p. 55)

[Essene] portrays a small society at work redefining itself both in the light of its particular members but also in light of larger cultural forces it both moves toward and with. The abbot is trying to steer a middle course between firm rejection and overeager acceptance of the new spirit (he is clearly troubled by many of its psychological and social consequences).

Looked at as a whole, the film sympathetically directs our attention first to the absence of shared experiences and directions in the community and then gives us several opportunities to witness modes of defining and arbitrating the conflicts. As the film builds to its complex conclusion, the question of leadership burns incandescently. The abbot has led in the past through a mild but skilled consensus-building, carefully avoiding outright exclusions of anyone and therefore vulnerable to the consequences or an uneasy truce. As the film develops, that uneasy truce shows clear signs of no longer serving its limited purpose….

Can the group generate a collective strength insuring cooperativeness and tolerance? Can the past traditions accommodate themselves to a consciousness so group-oriented that the contemplative ideals are not hopelessly compromised? Can an ages-old theological symbol-system fulfill the demands for personal therapy placed on it by these new group dynamics?

Such questions emerge organically from Essene, and they are scarcely so private to the world of an Anglican monastery somewhere in the midwest that they don't deserve our secular and even "anti-denominational" attention. Wiseman has shown in his accustomed documentary style—heavy on representative situations and encounters, a patient watching and listening for accumulated meanings—that any group which has accepted the necessity of reconstitution in today's culture is battling with basic problems of social philosophy and practice…. Essene is a film with a special resonance which may make it Wiseman's most important to date. (p. 57)