Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
Viridiana is preparing to start her life as a nun when she is sent, somewhat unwillingly, to visit her aging uncle, Don Jaime. He supports her; but the two have met only once. Jaime thinks Viridiana resembles his dead wife. Viridiana has secretly despised this man all her life and finds her worst fears proven when Jaime grows determined to seduce his pure niece. Viridiana becomes undone as her uncle upends the plans she had made to join the convent.
Buñuel's Palme d'Or-winning masterpiece is a savage, darkly comic assault on religious hypocrisy and bourgeois morality. The plot is bracingly original — a devout novice's faith is systematically dismantled through seduction, guilt, and the chaos of the beggars she shelters — and the acting, particularly Fernando Rey and Silvia Pinal, is superbly restrained. Cinematography is stark and expressively lit in high-contrast black-and-white, culminating in the infamous Last Supper tableau, one of cinema's most audacious images. Novelty is exceptional: the film is unmistakably Buñuelian in its surrealist undercurrents, anti-clerical fury, and refusal of sentimentality. The ending, however, while memorably cynical and thematically coherent, is slightly abrupt and somewhat less fully realized than the audacity of what precedes it — a minor but genuine concession.