So okay, this is by Luis Buñuel, the dude who tried really hard to be shocking with Un Chien Andalou (the movie where they cut open a woman’s eyeball with a razor), right. And from the brief description attached to it, it’s about a nun, and it was banned by the Spanish government and censured by the Vatican, and so going into it, I’m like, well, this is going to be a cavalcade of monstrosities, right. And then… it kinda wasn’t.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of offensive stuff in here (cw: sexual assault), but it’s not just a parade of horrors; and at least one of the angles of offense is one that’s essentially conservative by modern standards.

So, the first part of the story is that the titular Viridiana is just about to be sworn in as a nun, but her uncle (her mom’s sister’s husband), who she doesn’t really know but who has been paying for her nun lessons or whatever, invites her to visit. She doesn’t really want to, because she’s super-pious and doesn’t want to leave the nunnery, but the head nun is like, come on, he’s paying a lot of money here, go see him.

So she does, and now we’re in kind of a Gothic horror movie. Because the uncle lives in a giant decaying mansion with an unused and unmaintained farm around it, with only a couple of servants (and their little girl) as company. He spends a lot of time playing an organ, he has a trunk with like a wedding dress in it that he sometimes stares at, you know, just totally normal non-creepy stuff.

And so Viridiana, meanwhile, is being super-religious in a way that’s also creepy. She sleeps on the floor (because… soft beds are a sin?), she wears a nightgown of coarse linen, she has a literal crown of thorns that she unpacks along with her personal cross and rosaries and Bible, etc. At one point, she sleepwalks and throws little luxuries into the fire, then (still sleepwalking) scoops ashes out and puts them on the bed. So yeah.

And anyway, at first she doesn’t like her uncle, but as her time there goes on, she becomes fond of him. On the evening before her last day, he asks her a totally non-creepy favor, which is to dress up in the wedding dress, which it turns out belonged to his dead wife, who apparently looked just like her. HAHA COOL, FUN TIMES, but she does. And then he proceeds to ask her to marry him, and she’s like, aw man, I was enjoying this and now you had to go ruin it, why do you have to be like that. So then, with the help of his female servant, he drugs her and takes her back to the bedroom, and… actually doesn’t rape her. He intends to, and he begins to assault her, but then stops.

Then the next day she’s like “wtf, I’m getting out of here,” and then he has the brilliant plan of saying that he raped her, so that she’s ruined and can’t go back to the nunnery, and hey, might as well just stay here now, right?

Shockingly, this plan does not result in her wanting to stay with him, so then he’s like “hey, I didn’t really rape you,” and he very badly wants her to not think ill of him, which seems optimistic. She continues to think ill of him, and leaves; so then he hangs himself with a jump rope.

Good times! So that’s part one of the movie. The second part involves Viridiana getting summoned back to the house by the cops ‘n’ mayor, who are like, “hey, your uncle’s totally dead, and he left his estate to you and his illegitimate son who he never really knew,” and now we get the part where these two are co-administering the estate.

Here, the movie is doing a pretty explicit compare-and-contrast with these two. The son is a worldly man of business, has an unmarried long-term mistress that he’s living with, drinks, plays cards, etc. And meanwhile, Viridiana’s still got her crown of thorns and is going to live in an out-building, sleeping on the world’s hardest bed. He devotes himself to fixing up the estate and modernizing it to make money; she devotes herself to using the out-buildings to house and feed beggars, which she views as her calling from God now that she’s not going back to the nunnery. People make fun of her for this, because the beggars are worthless human scum not worthy of sympathy, but she is stalwart in her idealism that charity can help people.

Along the way, there’s a scene where the son sees someone driving a cart with their dog tied to the axle, so that it has to run to keep up with the cart, or else die. He’s appalled by this, and when the dog’s owner refuses to stop doing it, he buys the dog himself so he can rescue it. And as he’s walking away from that scene, we see another cart go by with a dog tied up underneath, as basically a sly “lol at your liberal bleeding-heart principles, dipshit” cynical cut. THIS IS FORESHADOWING.

Oh also along the way, the son clearly has a thing for Viridiana, and his lover is annoyed by this and leaves him, and he’s like wevs okay cool. When Viridiana isn’t interested in him, he then makes a pass at that servant lady, and she is totally into it, so thankfully a proclivity for assault doesn’t run in the family.

And then we get to the climax of the film, which is Viridiana, the son, and the servant lady all going out of town, and the beggars deciding to check out the main house… which then turns into having a feast at the main table… which then turns into a drunken shitshow of chaos and destruction… which then, when Viridiana and crew get back early, turns into them attacking and tying up the son and trying to assault Viridiana again, because yeah of course. The tied-up son manages to bribe one of the other beggars to murder the one who’s assaulting her before much happens, and then the cops show up, so all’s well that ends well, I guess.

But so now we can tell that Viridiana has learned a lesson — it’s stupid to be idealistic about the poor, because they’re terrible people (see what I mean about the essential conservativeness here?); but since that impulse was tied to her religiosity, she basically drops all of that, too. There’s a shot of her crown of thorns burning on a fire, and then the ending scene of the movie is her coming to the son’s bedroom at night with her hair let down.

According to reviews, in the original cut of the movie, the clear implication was that she was reconsidering her rejection of him before and now they’re going to boink; but censors shot that down, so Buñuel instead had him with his mistress there, and when Viridiana shows up, they sit down to play a game of cards, accompanied by ménage à trois double entendre, in one of those “make it even dirtier after they try to censor it” moves.

So anyway, yeah, it’s not exactly inoffensive, but by the standards of an intentional eyeball-slicing provocateur, it’s fairly tame. And really, while I don’t buy into its conclusions completely, exploring the worldly vs. saintly dichotomy means it at least has something that it’s trying to say beyond just being shocking. I think this is the kind of thing that gets historically overrated by virtue of its forbidden-ness, but there is a real movie here.