Hermana Muerte: I Saw The Light

As far as I’m concerned, prequels are worse than sequels, and heaven knows I don’t like sequels. Horror thrives on mystery, and prequels and sequels alike tend to dismantle that mystery. Sequels tend to belabor what worked so well in the original films, but now we’re expecting it, so its power is lost. Prequels, on the other hand, strip away the unknown from the original film. I don’t want origin stories for my monsters, I want them to be unknowable and terrifying. I want them to be facts of the world, irreducible.

Well, most of the time. There are always exceptions. Even as I’m writing this, I’m thinking that I wouldn’t mind seeing a Lovecraftian take on Breaking Bad, about a man who turns to dark rituals out of desperation and gradually loses everything. I’d watch that. But back to the matter at hand. Hermana Muerte (Sister Death) works as a prequel to the very good demonic possession film Veronica for a couple of reasons. First, it’s a fully realized story about an incidental character from Veronica, and second, because it’s put together with skill. That said, while it’s well-constructed, I found it an easier film to appreciate than to fully like or engage with.

The film begins in Spain, in 1939, with scratchy, home-movie footage of a little girl in a small village. She’s clutching a cross and staring ecstatically into the sky. People crowd around her as she appears to witness something, to see something only she can see. She kneels, arms spread wide in supplication or in a reenactment of the crucifixion. It’s hard to say. Ten years later, a young woman in a novice’s habit walks up to a convent, bleached white under the midday sun. It’s the little girl, all grown up. Her name is Narcisa, and after years of being locally celebrated as “The Holy Child,” she’s come here to take her final vows. Before the civil war, it was a cloistered convent, but what sisters were able to make it back have re-opened it as a school for underprivileged girls. Narcisa will be teaching classes as a replacement for Sister Ines. The sisters are…evasive…about her departure.

All seems about as well as it can - the girls learn lessons alongside performing chores around the convent, the better to provide them with skills that will be useful to them once they reach adulthood and have to find employment - or a husband. But there are little things - children’s balls that come rolling down the hallway with no girls in sight. Games of Hangman that appear on the walls. Loud banging and weeping in empty hallways.

Girls that have disappeared, never to be seen again.

The thematic spine of this movie is the way people and nations have to grapple with their past and the things that haunt them. Narcisa experienced an ecstatic vision of the Virgin Mary as a child, and has been wracked by doubt ever since, even as she became something of a local celebrity. Was it a vision sent from God, or the Devil? Why won’t God send her a sign that what she saw was divine? She prays, she fasts, she mortifies her flesh, still nothing. Some of the sisters see her taking the vows as a good thing, the “Holy Child” dedicating herself to God, but others believe she’s a charlatan, or worse. It seems like part of Narcisa wants to run away from all of it, the pressure, the expectations, the resentment, the burden of being her, but wherever she goes, there she is. Likewise, the sisters of the convent are still wrestling with the fallout from the Spanish Civil War and the rise of fascism in Spain. The way the convent was ransacked, the sisters who were lost, the ones who left and never came back. The war is over, but its reminders are all around them. Bullet holes pock the convent’s entrance, and the Mother Superior says that no amount of lime will ever cover them. Everyone and everywhere is scarred. The convent’s bloody history is written into its walls, sunken deep into its stone, and the sisters really, really don’t want to talk about it.

And dark secrets are the spine of the majority of ghost movies. This one is no different, following pretty standard narrative beats - lots of little things like chairs tipping over by themselves, footsteps when there’s nobody there, mysterious noises, somebody’s mementos left forgotten in the back of a closet, pictures missing from a photo album, the usual. And, of course, all of this leads Narcisa to start asking questions and digging into things nobody wants exhumed. The first act is slow, maybe even a bit meandering as Narcisa keeps experiencing things she can’t explain when she’s awake and oddly specific nightmares when she’s asleep. At the same time she’s getting a sense of how the convent and school work, but it’s all very gradual and understated. Things start to cohere a little more in the second act as Narcisa learns more – there’s a ghostly girl that all the students are afraid of and that the sisters (of course) insist doesn’t exist. They’re very, very keen on drumming that nonsense out of the girls’ heads and very upset when Narcisa take the girls seriously…just like Sister Ines did. Of course, Narcisa is going to continue sticking her nose where the sisters don’t want her to, out of a sense of guilt and a need to make good on her legacy as the local miracle. There are, of course, consequences, setting us up for a third act that does a good job of making up for a relatively static two-thirds as everything sort of goes off at once. Narcisa recapitulates her childhood with visions that are far less ecstatic and much more revelatory, past and present come together, like a piece of paper folded over in half, and all becomes clear, and there is a great and bloody atonement for the sins of the past. Just because you refuse to acknowledge something, that doesn’t make it go away.

Ultimately, this is pretty frustrating film for me, as it’s very well-made, but it ended up leaving me sort of cold. It has its startling moments (and the climax does a lot of the work here) but a lot of it isn’t anything especially novel early on, either narratively or visually, so it maybe doesn’t have the impact it could. More so than Veronica, it hews to very classic storytelling techniques and imagery, and though I like it when filmmakers appreciate the classics, in this case it feels like I’ve seen a lot of this before. That is, when I can see at all – part of the problem with filming inside a convent is the lack of lighting, so a number of scenes are dark enough that it’s difficult to make out what’s supposed to be happening and I think some moments that were meant to be revelatory or shocking got lost. But this eases up as the film goes on, as if more and more light is being let in as the truth becomes known, and there are shots that somehow manage to be beautiful and bloody at the same time. It’s not uneven, but it does take a little while to really get going, and the evenness sometimes feels static.

To its credit, it’s not a prequel to Veronica in any kind of franchise origin story way. The degree to which it intersects with that film is that this is the story of an incidental character from Veronica, a character I described as “the obligatory creepy nun,’ and it’s a story entirely her own, with no attachment to the story it precedes. This is the story of the obligatory creepy nun in her youth, before she was the imposing figure who had seen some shit (and relinquished her sight as a result). As in Veronica, eclipses play an important role, and the whole thing ends with Narcisa recapitulating her childhood before we move to the present and meet Veronica and her classmates, unaware of what is yet to come for them. It all fits together neatly, and it’s a film where nothing is gratuitous, but I wish it inspired more than a polite clap.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix