Kritiken

The nunsploitation genre was one that the openly gay and atheist [Almodovar] was destined to adopt at least once, and he did so through a surprisingly mature melodrama that pays tribute to the form in more ways than one... Dark Habits remains a jewel in its singular filmmaker’s body of work—one that tends to go unrecognized only because of the volume of hits it’s buried amongst.

The film operates like a high key sitcom, where camaraderie overrules plot contrivances. However, unlike the pithy misunderstandings of American primetime television, character development overrules the drama of sex, drugs and money. There is a poetry in how Almodóvar seems more interested in the cult of personality than moral trials. He loves people, and the more outrageous the better.

Almodóvar's third feature is slapdash, occasionally slow-moving, haphazardly plotted. That it's also wildly funny, bitchy, affecting and surreal is a tribute to his perennial warmth and wit.

Out of Diderot and Sirk (Thunder on the Hill), a most serene consideration of sin. . . . Pedro Almodóvar in the convent, a blasphemous irreverence cooled by melancholia.

Reminiscent of Robert Bresson's Les Anges du Péché, Dark Habits is a wickedly funny, irreverent, and outrageous portrait of aimlessness, spiritual desolation, and moral bankruptcy.

What gives [Dark Habits] its real intensity is Serrano’s performance. Her character is so twisted and tormented--and the actress plays it with such a seraphic face and such incongruous serenity--that she supplies the comic-melodramatic battle between flesh and soul almost single-handed.

[Almodovar] does not quite bring the events together, but his wry attitude toward conventional morality is not lost, and the acting is sufficiently controlled to keep the characters from running away into farce.

Unfortunately, [Dark Habits is] rather limp as narrative, and the better moments never quite make up for the sluggish filmmaking. Worst of all, the film commits an act of inexcusable (and tacky) vandalism: appropriating one of the most beautiful film scores ever written (by Miklos Rozsa, for Resnais’ Providence) without any acknowledgment and using diverse fragments of it with no sensitivity whatsoever.