• Entre Tinieblas (Dark Habits)

10/28/25 (Tues)

A cabaret singer taking refuge in a convent with nutty nuns – but we’re a long way from Sister Act. Almodóvar’s 1983 film was his third feature but the first to win wide notice. The Spanish title refers to a Catholic service that takes place in the three days before Easter, commemorating Jesus’ suffering and death through a gradual extinguishing of candles and ending in total darkness.

A cabaret singer’s abusive boyfriend dies from some bad heroin that he scored for her. Afraid of the police, she takes refuge in a local convent, the Order of the Humiliated Redeemers. She is given the room of a former woman who ran away to serve in Africa, where she was eaten by cannibals. The latter’s newly widowed mother, the Marquess, has decided to withdraw her support from the convent, leaving it in dire financial straits.

Mother Superior is a masturbating, cocaine-snorting, would-be lesbian with fantasies about the new recruit. She believes humiliation is the only way to redemption (“Man will not be saved until he realizes he is the most despicable being ever created”) and thus gives her followers degrading names: Sister Rat of the Sewers writes trashy novels under a penname based on the stories of former penitents; Sister Sh*t is haunted by guilt from a murder for which Mother Superior lied in order to save her, and often drops LSD (the hallucinogenic view from her perspective is hilarious); Sister Damned is fond of playing the bongo for her pet tiger, a surrogate child; and Sister Snake makes fashionable dresses for the Virgin Mary statues along with the chain-smoking priest, who she secretly loves (he adores the costumes for My Fair Lady but is apparently straight).

After a party in which the cabaret singer performs a sexy number specially for the Mother Superior, she decides to give up all of her sins, especially drugs and the Mother Superior. She sneaks off with the marquess, who has offered to put her up for as long as she’d like. The other nuns have deserted as well despite the Mother Superior’s determination to rebuild, but when the latter discovers that her crush has left, she screams hysterically and collapses as the movie closes. I assume that is the darkness that the Spanish title refers to.

The nuns are all sinners from one viewpoint, but that is who the convent is meant to succor. As the Mother Superior notes, “It is in imperfect creatures that God finds all his greatness” (though she’s looking at that moment at posters of Brigitte Bardot and Marlene Dietrich). They become human, in a sense, just as Jesus became man. That probably makes the loony film sound weightier than it is, but it does hint at interesting themes beneath the wildness. It seems less a criticism of Catholicism per se than an observation of the true nature of religion. It was made following the fall of the Franco regime, when Catholic-themed films were more sacrosanct, and was presumably a reaction to that. I imagine it plays differently for Spanish audiences all these decades later, but it is still a fascinating critique.

That all comes with plenty of drama and snarky talk among the women (“Move over a bit. The plant keeps hitting you in the moustache”), a highly quotable script, and memorable performances. The big musical number is fantastic despite an underwhelming lead thanks to the fabulous nun trio playing energetically behind her, all of whom were to become Almodóvar regulars. Loved the costume and gaudy set. The film seems to have mixed reviews, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.