‘Sister Death’: Catholic terror in a bloody convent

From its black-and-white prologue, steeped in Spanish popular beliefs, Sister Death manages to enter a space of pagan myths, ghosts, the dead and Catholic imagery. The walls of an old convent, whose austere and white beauty this dark film takes good advantage of, contain the secrets of a story that is presented as a prequel to Verónica and in which its director, Paco Plaza (of [REC] fame), brings into play the paranormal experiences of a teenager from a nun’s school and a working-class neighborhood in Madrid.

If in Verónica (2017) these hidden adventures were set in the 1990s — years of naive enthusiasm, of teenagers holding folders to their chests and Ouija board sessions — in Sister Death we delve into the origins of the story in a post-war Spain that is poor and broken. This time, the school is inside the convent itself, where girls without financial resources do laundry for the neighboring town and where cloistered nuns make homemade sweets. That is where the main character shows up. The young novice Narcisa is played heartbreakingly by Aria Bedmar. Narcisa is a former “holy girl” who now fights her crisis of faith with fasting, whipping and fear.

With a very solid script written together with Jorge Guerricaechevarría, Plaza has created a film that is among his best works (more well-rounded than The Grandmother and perhaps than Verónica itself) thanks to a staging that combines its Gothic tale background with Spartan architecture and an aura of fierce fatality and martyrdom. Sister Death is a thriller of horror and revenge built with visual elements that are as simple as they are disturbing, almost abstract: a sturdy wooden chair that always falls the same way to the ground, a crack in the wall, a series of mysterious and schematic drawings and the screams and blows that keep the nuns and their students awake every night.

Plaza mixes reality and dream with the same skill that he deploys to travel through Spanish historical memory to support an enticing main character full of pagan dark corners and delusions of holiness that are represented through that almost gory religious imagery that seems to cry blood. From a holy girl to a cursed old woman, Sister Narcisa goes through decades that seem like centuries until she becomes the representative of a folklore of rites and legends that no longer seem to interest the teenagers in a school in contemporary Spain. There, in a disturbing and perfect epilogue, the nun is introduced by a teacher with a sentence that suddenly sends the universe of Sister Death hurtling within that of Verónica: “I hope that “Sister Narcisa’s presence will encourage you to drop so much [pop music magazine] Súper Pop and read more Spanish classics.”