It is a type of lucid Disney movie crossing into a horror film. The earliest erotic movie. Melodrama about nuns.

Spoilers may lie ahead.

Team

In director’s commentary M. Powell mentions:

• high quality of the team and art department
• cases of intrinsic match of actors to roles
• directors role of believing in the project
• how the team kind of lived through the movie (without big picture possibly?)

And this final point probably assumes a degree of improvisation on actors part in the process and also a degree of freedom during the editing part. Although I have information about the director being very exacting. So I have no idea really.

Dialogues

First dialogue between Mr. Dean and sister Clodagh is not plain and that is how they all are going to be. There is always undercurrent of either humor or sensuality.

Because dialogues are “interesting”, acting therefore has higher resolution to pay attention to. I enjoyed acting even though I’m not a judge in matters.

Characters choice looks clear and balanced too given that I only started to pay attention to that aspect with this film.

Cuts

M. Scorsese as a major director himself pays a lot of attention to cuts in the commentary. He points attention and provides references.

It makes sense because cuts are what directors solve distinctly from static visual artists. It is this type of black matter of the movie - you are not supposed to really see it but it has it’s effect and I believe there is a lot more that happens on cuts level than general audience attributes to it retrospectively.

Visuals (strong visual spoiler)

Surely there are enjoyable shots, scenes, decisions.

Nuns are like snowy mountains while Mr. Dean is wearing a kind of black halo over a head.

Screen

In commentary M. Scorsese recommends to watch it specifically on the big screen projected as all of this collaboration movies. Interestingly BFI will have multiple runs of Black Narcissus in October and November in London. I don’t think 9 meter BFI NFT1 qualifies for big but still the event seems rare.

Bad Humour

I bet a lot of scripts are variations of the three-body problem in physics. You just don’t know which body hits into what first.