The Paradoxical Complexities of Time Travelling Ghost Nuns
Sister Death | Hermana Muerte (2023) is a Netflix prequel to Spanish supernatural horror movie Verónica. I know I’ve watched that one, but I don’t remember much of it save that it may have involved a Ouija board session gone wrong. It doesn’t really matter, though, because most of this movie takes place in the 1940’s and it’s only in the very end that there’s a short scene that serves to link it to Verónica. Warning: SPOILERS.
The year is 1949, and Sister Narcisa is a novice who arrives at a convent to teach poor girls. A decade earlier she became famous for being at the centre of miraculous events, but now that she’s about to take her vows, she’s beginning to have doubts. As she struggles with her lack of faith, she becomes aware of a dark presence who’s been haunting the convent. The other nuns may not believe it, but the children know that if you play one of the hangman’s games that turn up scribbled on the walls and your name appears on the black board, you’re next…
The convent is a naturally spooky setting, promising secrets and shocking reveals. Narcisa experiences supernatural phenomena almost from the start – a chair on her room falls, there are mysterious knocks on her door, a little hangman’s game shows up on her wall, and a marble leads her to a bundle in the basement containing a relic, the (literal) hand of Saint Martha, that had been missing since the war. There’s also the box in Narcisa’s room that has the photo of a nun, Sister Socorro, which she later finds out was taken from an album featuring all the nuns. And, to add a touch of gore, Narcisa even has an ominous nightmare in which she nearly eats a severed eye. The children are hiding secrets, too, and since their concerns were dismissed by the other nuns, they’re reluctant to confide in her. Slowly, however, she gains the trust of Rosa, who tells her about the ghost girl whose hangman’s games can prove deadly if you play with her and your name shows up in the blackboard. Why was Socorro’s photo removed? What does the ghost want? And what are the nuns hiding? Sister Death sets the stage for a good, scary story, but when it’s time to tie everything together, it falls apart. The decision to split the movie in 3 chapters – The Holy Girl; If She Writes Your Name, You Are Cursed; Sister Socorro – doesn’t help, as it breaks the flow of the story. This was a weird choice, as the movie is short and there aren’t any well-defined narrative stages other than the usual components – introduction, middle, and end. Frankly, it just felt like an excuse for the filmmakers to jump straight to the important scenes without bothering with the smaller ones in between.
The beginning, showing Narcisa’s childhood experiences, is spooky, and there are some scary situations throughout the movie, but, when taken as a whole, the haunting is confusing – what exactly happened before Narcisa’s arrival? The children say that whoever gets their name written on the blackboard is doomed, but there’s no mention of prior victims. Sister Ines, the nun Narcisa is replacing, completed one of the hangman’s games but then got scared and left. So, who has gone through all the stages? It’s one thing to be afraid of all the weird happenings, but why do the girls think the name on the blackboard means death? How many people died so far? The only one we get to see is Rosa, but her name appears on the blackboard before she even plays the hangman’s game. And when she does add to the ghost’s drawing, it’s only because Narcisa asks her to do it. Why was she even targeted in the first place? The girls don’t think it’s random, but the sole example the audience gets is random. And, for some reason, the movie decided to add hair cutting to the ghost’s bag of tricks. Yes, at one point it’s mentioned that nuns have to cut their hair, but no one ever makes the connection, and there doesn’t seem to be any reason for why the ghost would do that, or for why she would nearly choke Narcisa to death with her veil. I can understand why the girls thought the ghost was another child, but not the rest. Narcisa’s dreams don’t help, as they seem to point at a nonexistent demonic influence, and her investigation is annoyingly brief. She finds Socorro’s grave and gets Rosa to tell her what she knows before convincing her to complete the hangman’s game, but then we just get a vision-based info-dump while Narcisa goes blind for staring at an eclipse. The moment the movie shows the soldiers ransacking the convent and tormenting the nuns, part of what happened becomes obvious – Socorro was raped and got pregnant. After that, she gives birth in secret, and the nuns raise the child until she gets sick. Instead of taking her to a hospital, the Mother Superior and Sister Julia drag her to the bathroom and give her a cold bath, while a desperate Socorro bangs on her bedroom door and begs them not to do anything. The girl struggles with the nuns, hits her head, and dies. Upon knowing of her daughter’s dead, Socorro hangs herself in her room. This raises so many questions, the most important being what was stopping Socorro from targeting the Mother Superior and Julia. If she can hang Rosa and choke Narcisa, why the hell hadn’t she already killed the others? Why was she even going after innocent girls? And again, how many people did Socorro kill before now? Also, how dumb are these nuns that they thought it was a good idea to leave the suspicious box in Narcisa’s room? At first, I thought that Saint Martha might be a clue, but she’s the patron saint of housewives, servants, cooks, and similar professions. Wikipedia adds single laywomen and travellers, though this is absent from other lists. These 2 could apply to Narcisa, but if Socorro wanted to protect her, she wouldn’t have choked her. Unless this was a gift from the Virgin or God, but much like with the hair cutting and becoming a nun, who led Narcisa to the hand and why is never addressed in the movie.
Instead of trying to explain what Socorro was doing (and not doing), the movie opts to give the audience a time split final confrontation during which Socorro’s ghost gets the revenge that, as far as I can see, she could have got all along. First, in the present, Narcisa opens the door on which a desperate Socorro was banging after her daughter was taken away, so before she hanged herself. This somehow makes dead Socorro, who had just been found by Julia in the past (so after she had been banging on the door), wake up laughing and go on a killing spree, targeting the ones responsible for her daughter’s death. In the past. The injuries the nuns’ past selves get affect their present selves, so, after being drowned in a bloody bathtub in the past, the Mother Superior spits out bloody water in the present and dies from that drowning. This makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. If she’s killing them in the past, then that would mean they wouldn’t have been there in the present and Narcisa might not even have been sent to that convent or would’ve been interacting with other nuns and there wouldn’t have been a haunting in the first place because Socorro would’ve already had her revenge, which she only got because Narcisa found out what had happened to her and released her years after the events that turned her into a vengeful ghost in the first place. It’s a temporal paradox that adds absolutely nothing to the movie except more questions of WTF is going on and why. Socorro’s revenge ends when she reunites with her daughter’s ghost and they disappear into the light. Aw, how sweet, is the audience supposed to forget that she hanged Rosa and may or may not have killed more people who had nothing to do with her daughter’s death?
The non haunting bits aren’t exactly groundbreaking, nor properly explored. The strict discipline of the nuns, which gets Rosa locked away and forced to fast after being accused of cutting another girl’s hair and lying about it, but still allows the girls to have a radio, is expected, as is the nuns putting them to work doing laundry that the convent is being paid to wash. Narcisa having doubts after having her own miraculous experiences is interesting, as is Sister Julia’s accusation that maybe it wasn’t the Virgin who inspired her but the Devil. However, even as she questions herself, the former Holy Girl seems desperate to hold on to to her faith and routinely whips herself. All this makes Narcisa’s final decision hard to understand. I mean, she finds out that the nuns, including the kindly Mother Superior, endangered and accidentally killed a child, and years later, their idea of punishment is still locking away and starving children. Then, there’s the dead child’s mother, yet another nun, who has been terrorizing innocent children whose only crime is to have been sent to the convent’s school, and killed at least one of them. You’d think those doubts would be magnified after she learns this – instead, Narcisa finds her faith after having her eyes burned by an eclipse while God or the Virgin or whoever sends her visions of the convent’s looting. The quickness with which the final events unfold also makes it difficult for Narcisa to fully react to the reveals, and when she does, it’s directed at mean Julia rather than the nicer Mother Superior, or even Socorro’s vengeful ghost. What are Narcisa’s thoughts on everything – including Rosa’s death – that happened? How does she go from evil nuns + blindness to restored faith + taking vows? Of course, since this is a prequel to Verónica and Narcisa was a nun there, she had to become a nun here, but the movie should’ve given the audience more to justify her decision.
VERDICT
Sister Death has everything to be great, but stops at average. Of course, the title isn’t even about Socorro but Narcisa herself – it’s the nickname Verónica and her classmates will give her due to her psychic abilities. This almost feels like false advertising. The fact that it’s set in Spain, in the past, gives it a different look and feel from similar American offerings, but the story itself isn’t very original. That confusing final third would’ve been a lot better if done in a more straightforward way that didn’t make the audience wonder about the paradoxical complexities of time travelling ghost nuns. In one word, disappointing.
By Danforth