The plot summary here is very simple: A group of nuns in Calcutta goes off to this remote mountain fastness to found a nunnery there, despite being warned by basically everyone that it was doomed to failure. There’s a local dissolute British dude, who is dissolute; the sisters start having conflicts amongst themselves, particularly driven by one of the sisters who is interested in that dude, and is convinced that the head of the nunnery is trying to get him for herself. At the end, the conflicts come to a head when the jealous sister quits the order and attacks the head nun while she’s ringing the bell, and if you can see that cliff and not think someone goes over it at some point, well.

So apparently when it came out, this was startling and novel because a) it treated nuns as adult human people who could have sexual desire, which actually required it to be censored before it could be released in the US (it’s a British movie by Powell and Pressburger, who you will remember from WW2 fantasy A Matter of Life and Death), and b) the dark psychological drama. And then plus also there’s the cinematography, which is genuinely excellent.

Today, I think it comes across as kinda super-mild in comparison to modern films that are doing the same thing. Like, people isolated in a remote location, burning with dangerous sexual desire? There’s The Lighthouse again, except that if this was shocking to people of the time, The Lighthouse would have blown their friggin’ minds clean apart. Still and all, this does have a ten minute sequence where the jealous nun is stalking the other one that’s legit tense and creepy, so there’s not nothing here that way.

Mostly, though, what comes through in this movie to a viewer today is a kind of fatalistic resignation — the dissolute British guy has clearly given up on his life in pretty much every way, and never has any kind of revelation; and the nuns who so optimistically try to start this nunnery end up going back in complete failure, hardly having made a dent in the world except for a single grave. It feels less like a psychosexual thriller and more like a late colonial-era metaphor for the inevitable end of the colonialist project.