General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Dark Habits

Dark Habits (Spanish: Entre tinieblas) is a 1983 Spanish black comedy directed and written by Pedro Almodóvar, his third feature film, in which a drug-addicted nightclub singer takes refuge in a Madrid convent whose nuns harbor vices of their own.¹^•² It was the first of his films produced by a proper production company, Tesauro S.A., and it marked his international debut at the Venice Film Festival.³^•⁴

Key fact	Detail
Original title	Entre tinieblas ("Into the darkness")⁵
Director and writer	Pedro Almodóvar (born 1951), his third feature¹^•⁶
Production	Tesauro S.A., 1983; producer Luis Calvo; cinematography Ángel Luis Fernández; editing José Salcedo⁵^•⁷
Lead cast	Cristina Sánchez Pascual (Yolanda Bell), Julieta Serrano (Mother Superior), Marisa Paredes, Carmen Maura, Mary Carrillo, Lina Canalejas⁵
Spanish release	3 October 1983; 454,562 spectators and €699,072.49 in receipts per the ICAA catalog²^•⁸
Festival history	Rejected by Cannes; shown in a non-competitive sidebar at the 1983 Venice Film Festival⁹^•⁵
Setting	Almost entirely in a crumbling Madrid convent, the Convent of the Humble Redeemers¹

Spoilers

Plot

Yolanda Bell is a young bolero singer, drug-addicted and reckless, who watches her boyfriend Jorge die from a strychnine-laced heroin overdose that she herself supplied. Terrified of the police, she disappears into the Convent of the Humble Redeemers (Redentoras Humilladas), an order whose mission is protecting wayward girls. The Mother Superior had declared her admiration after seeing Yolanda perform at the Molino Rojo nightclub, and welcomes her warmly.²

The convent houses a chaplain and four nuns besides the Mother Superior, each with a defining vice: Sister Estiércol (Sister Manure) favors LSD and bakes it into cakes; Sister Perdida (Sister Damned) is obsessed with cleaning and keeps a pet tiger; Sister Rata de Callejón (Sister Rat) writes cheap romance novels under the pseudonym Concha Torres; and Sister Víbora (Sister Snake) sews high-fashion coverings for the convent's statues of the Virgin and loves the local priest.¹⁰^•¹¹ The Mother Superior herself is a heroin-addicted lesbian who falls in love with Yolanda.⁹

The order's finances collapse when its wealthy patron dies and his widow, the Marquesa (Mary Carrillo), cuts off donations. The nuns plan an evening extravaganza starring Yolanda to celebrate the Mother Superior's name day and to persuade their patroness not to abandon them.¹²

Production

Financing and casting. To fund the picture, Almodóvar relied on the industrialist Jacques Hachuel, who insisted that his wife, Cristina Sánchez Pascual, take the lead part. Almodóvar did not think Sánchez Pascual could sing or dance well enough to carry the movie, so he expanded the roles of other, more talented actresses; as he put it, "they grew and Cristina shrank."¹³ The imposition of Hachuel's casting choice is cited as an example of the producer interference that later led Almodóvar and his brother Agustín to found their own company, El Deseo, in order to exercise total control over his films.¹⁴

Place in Almodóvar's career. Dark Habits, What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984), and Matador were the last films he made for outside production companies. Dark Habits was the first produced by a proper production company, and in it Almodóvar began experimenting more widely with the technology at his disposal and dispensed with the proliferation of characters used in his previous film, Labyrinth of Passion (1982).³^•¹⁵ It is also described as the last of his low-budget films, though less trashy in some respects than Pepi, Luci, Bom (1980), and the film in which he first achieved recognition as a "director" from a sector that had not previously taken him seriously.¹⁶

Themes and style

The Harvard Film Archive notes that the film's bemused view of the veniality and hypocrisy of the human heart brings Almodóvar perhaps the closest to his great Spanish precursor, Luis Buñuel, and to the gulfs between public belief and private behavior that inspired Buñuel's dark comedies; the film offers a questioning allegory for the church's changing role in contemporary Spain.¹ Writing eight years after Franco's death, Almodóvar delivered an unapologetically ironic gaze at the Catholic Church, whose critical edge stirred controversy.⁹

The Monthly Film Bulletin observed that Almodóvar spins off from the continental "naughty nun" genre, including the sensationalist themes of lesbianism, clerical sex, and drug addiction, but makes his scandalous nuns uniformly innocent creatures whose vices are as much a part of their piety as their habits; only Yolanda, who exploits the sisters and proves shallow and callous, is treated harshly.¹⁷ The Mother Superior's line that "Jesus didn't die for the saints, but for the sinners" is described as a maxim that resonates throughout Almodóvar's cinema.⁹

The film belongs to the Madrid of the early 1980s Transition, when the movida madrileña, a cultural movement revolving around drugs, sex, drinking, and rock music, expressed Spain's newly gained freedom; Almodóvar's early films, including Dark Habits, are set in Madrid between roughly 1977 and 1983.¹⁸

Reception

Dark Habits was rejected by Cannes and shown in a non-competitive sidebar at the 1983 Venice Film Festival, where it marked Almodóvar's international debut.⁹^•⁴

Julieta Serrano won the 1984 Sant Jordi award for Best Spanish Actress for the film, and was nominated for the 1984 Fotogramas de Plata for Best Movie Actress.¹² Later assessments vary: Dennis Schwartz called it second-rate campy comedy, "all kitsch and no substance," while a Time Out London review found it "wildly funny, bitchy, affecting and surreal."¹¹^•¹⁹ The film has since been described as a cult favorite, and ACMI catalogs it as an "evil twin" of films such as Sister Act and The Sound of Music.²⁰^•²¹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Comedy and romantic films (individual works) › Comedies of the 1980s › Comedy-dramas of the 1980s

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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