Audiences cannot fail to register the enormity of Martin Scorsese’s achievement in Silence. At 160 minutes, it hangs heavy over the film: adapted from the 1966 novel by Japanese writer Shusaku Endo, Silence has been close on three decades in the director’s preparation. It raises questions that are usually approached with Capital Letters. There are moments that are visually enthralling, landscapes of nature that dwarf the sufferings – visceral, in the literal sense, since they involve damage to the human body – inflicted on many of its characters. We’ll leave the “and yets” to later…

The opening scene is paradigmatic: a wide landscape of torture, crucifixes placed by steaming pools which provide boiling water to agonise both the Christian believers of Japan and the western missionaries who came to convert them. It is 1633, and the Japanese authorities, perceiving Christianity as a threatening adjunct of colonialism, force their captives to deny their religion – to commit apostasy, the issue and the act which sears the very gut of Scorsese’s film.

You may be reminded of Christoph Waltz, or alternatively of Ken Dodd’s false teeth gags

Its usual form involved trampling on the fumi-e, an image of Christ or Mary; when proof of more extreme rejection was demanded, it involved spitting on the cross. Such were the dilemmas confronting Japan's hidden Christians, the Kakure Kirishitan, who attempted to worship in secret. But this opening scene forces a more extreme choice on the missionaries – to embrace their extreme suffering, in the manner of Christ, or to make an exemplary repudiation of belief. Under such circumstances, that denial can never be treated – let alone interpreted – as following God’s will. Or can it?

The Jesuit priest at the centre of Silence is Father Ferreira (Liam Neeson, pictured below), although we encounter him only in its last scenes. When reports of Ferreira denying his faith eventually reach his order back in Lisbon, two of his incredulous disciples – Fathers Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Francisco Garrupe (Adam Driver) – volunteer to travel to Japan to prove his innocence. They seem far from heroic figures, although they undertake such a journey at obvious risk to their own lives.Their quest may have earned comparison to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and along with that Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, but it’s a pale equation. Neeson’s Ferreira has wrought not physical horror, rather – if anything – a cerebral one (while the charge that Silence aims for the brain, rather than the heart, is a real one). The two priests’ journey to the shores of Japan is easy enough; in Macau they acquire a guide, the eccentric Kichijiro (Yosuke Kubozuka), whose lapses go beyond religion, and for whom denial and seeking forgiveness follow a practically cyclical basis, to occasionally comic effect.

But the priests’ first encounters with the hidden believers of Japan (Taiwan provided most locations for the film) are deadly serious, not least because of the mortal threat of discovery. The celebration of sacrament (pictured below) in secret has the urgency of the early Roman catacomb believers, and is received with a joy that seems greater than in more secure environments (though whether that is actually the case is another question, raised later). Their ministry continues, but the two priests can only escape capture for so long, at which point Scorsese narrows the perspective of his film to concentrate on Garfield’s character.There’s a change of register, too. Rodrigues faces expert opponents, in the figure of the local inquisitor Inoue (Issey Ogata) particularly, as well as the latter's interpreter (Tadanobu Asano). It's a sometimes unsettling balance: Ogata is something of a Japanese thespian legend – he played Emperor Hirohito in Alexander Sokurov's The Sun, too– who’s as much famed as a comedian, and he manages occasionally disarming comic effects here. (You may be reminded either of Christoph Waltz, or alternatively of Ken Dodd’s false teeth gags.)

Inoue’s tactics are deadly, however. He forces his captive to witness cruelty wrought on others – burning and blood-draining are mild when set against crucifixion-drowning – all the time reminding Rodrigues that he only has to perform a single gesture to stop such torture. Intellectually too, he articulates the view later espoused by Ferreira himself when the two priests eventually meet, that the Japanese believers had never followed true Christianity, rather a mixed-up belief system that overlapped with their pantheism; and that Japan is a "swamp" where Christianity “does not take root”. To all of Garfield’s prayers, his God remains silent.

That final meeting with Ferreira is anticlimactic – worse, it lacks the intensity of communication that might provide dramatic conviction. The older westerner now lives with a Japanese wife, as in due course will Rodrigues (echoes of Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ). What we witness of their closing years is treated with a rapidity that at this stage comes as considerable relief. These are actors expiring with a whimper, and not making us believe in the significance of that last gasp, although how you interpret the film’s final scene will certainly affect your final judgment of it (as, inescapably, will your own religious convictions, or lack thereof).

Scorsese regulars Dante Ferretti and Rodrigo Prieto make stand-out contributions in production design and cinematography respectively, as was to be expected. Three years after the drastically different The Wolf of Wall Street – that contrast is so huge – it’s hard to say just what we might have expected from Silence. We can’t judge the director for the range of his intentions, however, but rather on the integrality of his execution. On that basis Scorsese’s new film falls short: being ponderous does not equate with achieving gravity.

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How’s this for a Christmas-week story? Joan, a young peasant girl – played in this version by the charismatically attractive Gemma Arterton – grows up in the bleak French countryside. She hears voices. It’s 1429, and they tell her to lift the siege of Orleans and defeat the English invaders. She inspires troops, she inspires the Dauphin. She helps crown him King of France. She is betrayed, captured by the English, tried as a heretic and burnt at the stake. Some 25 years later, the authorities realise that they have made a terrible mistake.

You can easily see why George Bernard Shaw’s play, which was first put on in 1923, soon after Joan’s canonisation as a saint, is regarded as a tragedy, albeit a tragedy without villains, since all of the main protagonists behave more or less in good faith. Its full title is Saint Joan: A Chronicle Play in Six Scenes and an Epilogue, and Shaw’s own wordy preface includes his vision of the moral of the story: “It is what men do at their best, with good intentions, and what normal men and women find that they must and will do in spite of their intentions.” Yes, there are no winners in this tale.

Joan is a member of the awkward squad, a danger to complacency

This modern-dress version of the play (pictured below), is directed by Josie Rourke and designed by Robert Jones, and starts with Duncan McLean’s video screens proclaiming the Shawism: “Must Christ perish in every age to save those that have no imagination?” and, in tribute to the anniversary of another war, showing the steady fall of red poppy petals. Then we are in the world of Bloomberg and commodities futures, as the screen reports that egg prices are soaring because of an inexplicable shortage (an in-joke about the play, which indeed starts with Joan’s miraculous ability to make hens lay eggs). The story then unfolds through a series of set-piece scenes – Joan meets the Dauphin, Joan relieves Orleans, the English plot Joan’s downfall, Joan is tried and condemned as a heretic.

Although the play has its Shavian windbag longueurs, this production radiates with contemporary resonance. First, it is a story about an outsider who galvanises a nation, making it proud and patriotic again (echoes of Brexit), and, second, it is also a story about social justice, and individual responsibility. Joan upsets the hierarchical feudal system by insisting that she doesn’t need the church as an intermediary: God speaks to her directly. In her fanaticism, we can hear echoes of any religious fundamentalist. And her trial for heresy, during which she is also accused of witchcraft, shows how men hate women who succeed. For Joan is a member of the awkward squad, a danger to complacency and routine: one of the charges against her was her transvestitism.

Inevitably Arterton has to carry the weight of all of this on her well-toned shoulders. Luckily, despite her warrior gear, this is a modern-day production so it doesn’t matter that she never looks or acts like a peasant girl. Instead, her performance has the sweet naivety of the well-brought-up young woman whose beliefs inspire her to be goodness incarnate. It’s also a very tactile reading: Joan touches the hands, the arms and the faces of her accusers in a genuinely saintly manner, glowing with forgiveness. A mixture of eloquent simplicity and ardent fanaticism, she attracts and repels in equal measure. It’s probably blasphemous to call her acting miraculous, but at some moments it really feels like that.

The rest of the cast (the men) can’t really compete with this radiance, although I liked Fisayo Akinade’s campy Dauphin, Niall Buggy’s aggressive archbishop, Hadley Fraser’s loyal Dunois and Jo Stone-Fewings’s scheming Warwick. Richard Cant, Syrus Lowe, Rory Keenan and Matt Bardock take on a couple of roles each. Amid constant video reminders of Joan’s place in the iconography of the Catholic church, and on a revolving stage, this is a very long, but intellectually fascinating and emotionally moving evening. Despite its contemporary relevance, there may not be a lot of Christmas cheer to be derived from this story, but some crumbs of cold comfort will almost certainly fall into your lap.

• Saint Joan is at the Donmar Warehouse until 18 February 2017 
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The Doctor's Dilemma, National Theatre (2012). Tragedy is the spoonful of sugar that helps this medical satire go down

Widowers' Houses, Orange Tree Theatre (2014). A timely revival of a timeless satire

Man and Superman, National Theatre (2015). A theatrical trip to Hell with Ralph Fiennes has some heavenly moments

The Philanderer, Orange Tree Theatre (2016). Modern-dress Shaw is resonant but long-winded

@AleksSierz

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