Film Fatale: Celluloid Sisters, Theological Final Girls and the Year of the Nun
Words: Charlotte Landrum
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Two of the most innate themes in cinema are religion and women’s suffering. You ask your local film bro what their favourite movie is, and they say Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957), and in the same breath, Ari Aster’s Midsommer (2019). It makes sense. Both faith and female suffering are perceived as fateful: curiosity about what lurks in the clouds controlling us all has led to the perception of the unruly woman, doused in sin from the day she tasted the forbidden fruit.
Her suffering is a requirement for any and all good religious storytelling. When you put worship and the pain of womanhood together, you get the nun film, or as the trope is often titled, nunsploitation. A long line of works spanning from over one hundred years of cinema - from The White Sister (1923) and Haxan (1922) to Immaculate (2024) and The First Omen (2024) - depicting chaste, veiled women in religious doubt, tragedy and occasionally, ecstasy.
Recently, nun iconography has taken a chokehold on the zeitgeist. Arguably she never left - we had habit motifs in fashion in John Galliano SS 2020, Cate Le Bon’s flawless 2022 album Pompeii, and Catholic chic has been trending across socials for a couple of years. But now the nun image feels pointed with intention, giving the character voice rather than merely appreciating her trad-cath aesthetics. In the last two months we have already seen the release of two almost identical in narrative nun films, as well as a raunchy nun Rihanna Interview cover by Nadia Lee Cohen (a recreation of vintage Pewboy). These works have sparked conversations of what is sacrilege and what is not - if Sydney Sweeney really is destroying the woke left, and has reintroduced a generation (that previously only associated the nun film with the Conjuring universe) to a wealth of works bursting at the seams with cinema’s IT girls taking their vows. See: Ingrid Bergman, Audrey Hepburn, Anna Karina, Isabelle Huppert and Margaret Qualley.
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Before the nuns were featured in softly-lit, reblog worthy exploitation films or their iconography used for Halloween costumes à la Ms. 45 (1981), sisters became the heart of the western film industry during the postwar era. The women of America and the UK were reflecting on their time working whilst the men were away: the conundrum of whether to stick with the family traditions or to become a woman of the workplace was a focal point. It was perfect timing for the nun film to thrive, as Martha Smith writes in Spirited Lives: “Nuns had the potential to disrupt the discourses of femininity since they operated outside the confines of heterosexual domesticity.” The nun became the ultimate allegory for tradition vs the modern world with stories of her struggle between maintaining faith and giving in to the desires of modern life.
Pressburger and Powell’s Black Narcissus (1947) is one of the most famous nun pictures of all time. The nuns were placed in an isolated convent in the Himalayas, resulting in hysteria and death as two sisters fall for the same man. Sister Ruth harbours a huge resentment and envy, through which she loses her faith. She glares from red-lit corners on top of the windy mountain with eyes circled crimson and despite the cathartic rebellion she shows to the audience, Sister Ruth ultimately dies during her final hysteric frenzy. Confirmation from the 1940’s film industry that if you stray too far away from tradition, it will not end well. Almost two decades later, the nun still suffers. Jacques Rivette’ The Nun (1966) set in 18th century France follows Suzanne (Anna Karina) on a tragic journey as she is sent to a convent against her will. Her family sends her there as she is an illegitimate child who represents nothing but sin to her mother. Suzanne is starved, abused and preyed on by the nuns as she does not want to adopt the religious life and begs to be released from her covenant. It doesn’t end well for Suzanne. At no point can she gain control of her own life; the allegory alludes to female complicitness in upholding patriarchal values and regimes as her fellow nuns find no sympathy for the rebel within their system.
“To obtain freedom in the confines of the convent, the cinematic nun has only one option: possession.”
To obtain freedom in the confines of the convent, the cinematic nun has only one option: possession. Possession, oftentimes, gave the sister the opportunity to let loose, sprint around, spit in the face of the reverend mother, and then place the blame of her blastermous behaviour on the devil. Her innate sin of being a woman is constantly reiterated. When not literally depicted as the devil incarnate, self flagellation and punishment are part of daily life. Described perfectly by Carol Clover in Men, Women, Chainsaws: “Cause a girl enough pain, repress enough of her rage, and - no matter how fundamentally decent she may be - she perforce becomes a witch”. Films like Mother Joan of the Angles (1961) and The Devils (1971) depict the concept with grandiose scenes of possession, choreographed movements that strike fear into the priests attempting to exorcise them. The nuns - the women - now, finally, control the narrative via the chaos they have created. As Mother Joan says: “If one can't be a saint, it's better to be condemned”.
This visceral version of the nun film makes me think of Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain by Leslie Jamison, as she uses religiously abused Carrie (1977) as an example of taking female suffering and using it as power, rather than to punish yourself like the scripture intended “Carrie responds to the shame of fertility by weaponizing it—she doesn’t get rid of the bleeding; she gets baptised by it.” Jamison writes. “She doesn’t wound herself; she wounds everyone else.” Both protagonists of new nun flicks Immaculate and The First Omen are baptised in their own blood during their forced pregnancies, gaining faith in themselves rather than in God as they fight their way out of oppressive situations. Margaret responds to the priest during the finale of The First Omen when he asks if she hears the voice of God after giving birth to the antichrist: “No, I can only hear my own”.
Corny one-liners aside, I thoroughly enjoyed The First Omen. The film couldn’t have been more overt with comparing the political unrest in 1970s Rome with the political climate today and marrying the classic films mentioned with the expectations of modern audiences. Father Brennan even uses the phrase “unprecedented times” which I had only ever previously heard used in the context of the Covid pandemic. The film focuses on the church’s concern of a Godless generation, their answer being to create an antichrist and use fear to lead the youth back to the Lord. Similar to the postwar nun film trope, The First Omen uses the oppressive structures of religion to reach out to a generation of perplexed individuals - particularly women - and give them what they want: stories of dismantling elites in the historically reliable nun narrative format.
With the pro-choice sentiments and themes of revenge permeating Immaculate and The First Omen, the nun is no longer an image of safety and purity but rather one that is fighting back, writhing around and becoming a type of theological final girl. The new guard of nuns are fighting priests armed with holy water and wombs full of antichrists; a parallel to the overturn of Roe v. Wade, the rise of conspiracy theorists and the speculation that Gen Z are the most “conservative generation in history”. It no longer takes being an 18th century sister to understand the feeling of walls closing in. This is why it is the Year of the Nun. We are trying to avoid being unfortunate victims like Suzanna in The Nun or Sister Ruth in Black Narcissus. We are Sydney Sweeney uttering “Ciao?” in a huge, grand church without a bra on - confused and ultimately bait for a dark sided agenda. We are Nell Tiger Free recreating scenes from Possession (1981) as we attempt to escape the old cronies trying to drag us back into their church basement. There is unending potential for where we take these celluloid sisters, and the confines of the cinematic convent can’t be a more perfect setting for the telling of woman’s struggle.