Monastic life is anything but tedious in Xavier Beauvois’ masterful drama “Of Gods and Men,” based on the real-life tragedy of seven French monks abducted and beheaded during Algeria’s civil war in 1996.

The film is largely built of ordinary tasks and everyday moments: monks tending their crops, treating Muslim villagers at the monastery clinic, caring for their beehives and taking the honey they produce to market, sharing simple meals, and, of course, chanting in devotion during Mass.

Underlying all this is a tangible, terrible tension. These good Christians know there are forces — both in the besieged government and among terrorists who want to bring it down — that no longer want them there. And the atrocities happening all around them — Croatian construction workers whose throats are slit, young women shot dead because they were not wearing veils — make it unbearably clear to the monks that their lives are in danger each day they choose to stay.

What follows is a truly glorious story of brotherhood, no matter what you think of the monks’ faith, servility or judgment, or their choice to sequester themselves in celibacy in the first place. These are men battling to validate the place they have made for themselves in this life, and watching that struggle, foreign though it is to those of us in the secular world, is fascinating.

Lambert Wilson as head monk Christian and Michael Lonsdale as monk-physician Luc lead a cast that is, without overstatement, divine. The filmmakers chose a range of faces with wonderful expressiveness, the actors revealing tortured souls and soaring spirits, sometimes in the same instant, without saying a word.

These are not saints or angels but men who fear death as much as the next guy. To the Muslims living nearby, though, the monks are saints, providing medical services and counsel without the slightest preaching of their own faith.

Beauvois is deliberately hazy about the circumstances of the monks’ deaths, which were blamed on a radical group, though some observers have suggested the Algerian military was involved.

The story is less about specific enemies and more about the denial of enmity — the certitude that devotion is devotion, which should not waver when circumstances are troubling or threatening.

It’s a sin against “Of Gods and Men” that it did not make the list of nine Oscar finalists, let alone take one of the five nominations.

But you can help Hollywood atone: Go see this rapturous movie.