A romcom with very little com: BBC1’s Black Narcissus reviewed

In Black Narcissus, based on the novel by Rumer Godden, five nuns set off for a remote Himalayan palace in 1934 to set up a convent school. The palace, donated by an Anglophile general, used to be a harem and was still adorned with erotic paintings. It was also where the general’s sister, Srimati, had committed suicide and where, just a few months previously, a male religious order had tried to establish a school too, before retiring defeated for mysteriously undisclosed reasons. The nuns’ main helper in practical matters, a British expat called Mr Dean (Alessandro Nivola), possessed an overwhelming maleness that expressed itself through such attributes as a chiselled jaw, an Indiana Jones hat and a handy way with a spanner. So what could possibly go wrong? The answer, naturally, was quite a lot — although much of it very very slowly.

The nuns’ leader Sister Clodagh (Gemma Arterton) was initially characterised by a rather priggish commitment to perfection that extended to questions of grammar. ‘It is I,’ she told Mr Dean when he came looking for the new Sister Superior. ‘None of us is different,’ she explained to a fellow nun struggling to cope with the surroundings. Before long, though, Clodagh began to recognise that neither her more undesirable desires nor the reality of her new world could be covered up as easily as those erotic paintings. Instead, the sight of Mr Dean wielding his spanner brought on some sexy images of her own as she remembered a pre-convent relationship. Officially, needless to say, she disapproved of Mr D.’s uncouthness — what with his fondness for whisky and local lovelies. On the other hand, he did look good in that hat…

Meanwhile, as the window shutters banged away to unmistakably sinister effect, the palace was having a spooky effect on the other nuns too: especially Sister Ruth (Aisling Franciosi), who started to have visions of Srimati and to bear a growing resemblance to Linda Blair in the early scenes of The Exorcist.