Dark Habits

Director: Pedro Almodóvar

1983 / 114min / DCP

When her lover overdoses fatally on a batch of heroin that she provided, punky bolero singer Yolanda (Cristina Sánchez) hides out from the cops at the dilapidated convent of the order of Humiliated Redeemers, where the lascivious drug-addled Mother Superior enforces vows of humility by giving her nuns, all fallen into idleness and eccentric habits, demeaning names: Sister Sewer Rat, Sister Snake, Sister Manure, and Sister Damned, the last named played by Camren Maura, an OCD neat freak with a pet tiger whom she entertains by playing the bongos. A very funny meditation on human hypocrisy, both secular and religious, and the uncertain role of the Catholic church in post-Franco Spain which finds Almodóvar, more than in any other film, showing his debt to Luis Buñuel, who died the year of the film’s release.