Gemma Arterton as the ambitious and troubled Sister Clodagh
Credit: Miya Mizuno
Black Narcissus, Rumer Godden’s 1939 bestseller, has the atmosphere and self-sufficiency of a dream. This story of a group of Anglican nuns who set out to establish the Convent of St Faith in northern India during the 1930s is compressed, sublimely visual and psychologically astute. Like a dream, its surface of compelling singularity flows over darker universal currents, and as with a dream, any attempt to explain it is bound to break its spell. From the moment we enter the narrative, along with ambitious alpha female Sister Clodagh – “the youngest Sister Superior in the Order” – we are dispatched up a mountain to discover an impossibly vivid, beautiful and troublesome place, which has many names: Mopu Palace, the House of Women, and now the Convent of St Faith. Most recently some German Jesuits attempted to rebrand the former seraglio as St Saviour’s School, before abandoning their missio