Sister Death Plot Summary
Netflix’s Spanish horror film Sister Death is a prequel to the streaming service’s big 2017 hit, Veronica. The film tells the horrifying backstory of Sister Narcisa, the blind nun from Veronica, whom many of the students at the all-girls school are scared of, and they give her the nickname Sister Death due to her scary appearance.
What is Sister Death about?
Sister Death begins with what seems to be a flashback to set up the story of Sister Narcisa. We see a young girl experiencing some sort of dark event that is happening during the Spanish Civil War. She is then given special supernatural gifts.
We then meet her when she is much older and about to become a full-fledged nun, but she also seems to be having a bit of a crisis of faith. She begins her work at an old convent that was turned into an all-girls school. It is here that she becomes well aware of the dark history of the school.
The old convent has a haunting of a child who died years earlier, and a creepy-looking old nun haunts the building as well, Sister Socorro. Sister Narcisa eventually learns of the brutal past and what Mother Superior and Sister Julia have kept hidden for many years.
What happened to Sister Socorro and her daughter?
As the backstory of the haunting unfolds, we learn that years earlier, Sister Socorro had a daughter who developed a fever. The nurses take the little girl in and bar Socorro from entering the room. Mother Superior and Sister Julia attempt to bring the girl’s fever down by putting her in an ice-cold tub.
As they try to place her in the tub, her head whacks the back of it, and she begins to bleed out from the wound and eventually die. As Socorro learns of this, she makes a drastic choice and goes into her room and hangs herself.
The evidence of this unfortunate accident becomes prevalent when Sister Narcisa learns of a bathtub in a bathroom late one night and there is ghostly hair seeping up through the drain. She is also haunted by a drawing of a stick figure of someone being hanged and a chair that appears flipped over, making the thud on the ground. The same chair Sister Socorro used to stand on as she hanged herself
What is the significance of the Spanish Civil War and the Eclipse?
Throughout the movie, there is an impending eclipse happening in the sky. It turns out that in the film’s opening moments, Sister Narcisa is looking into an eclipse in the sky.
Later on, when she arrives at the school and learns about the convent, there are areas around the building that show evidence of the brutality that happened there during the Spanish Civil War. A wall has bullet holes all over it, signaling a firing squad that once lined up people and shot them there.
Later on in the film, when another eclipse happens, Sister Narcisa walks out into the sun and looks up and stares at it. At this point in the film, she is being kicked out of the school due to her knowledge of the haunting growing more and more and making her suspicious, as well as the discovery of another child dying in the same manner as Sister Socorro.
However, it is through the eclipse that she gains visions of what once happened during the war. Sister Socorro was sexually assaulted by a soldier. She conceived a child; the other nuns kept the fact that she was a nun and also a mother to a little girl concealed by outsiders. This makes it more tragic when her daughter dies and she commits suicide.
How does the ending of Sister Death set up Veronica?
In the film’s final scene, we see a much older Sister Narcisa. She looks like she would in Veronica. She walks into a classroom of all girls, examines the room, and gives a glare to one of the girls in the room. Her eyes and the skin complexion around them have always been haunting to look at.
And in Sister Death, we learn the backstory as to why she looks like that. It was due to her staring into the eclipse for too long, which tells you she is lying or frankly just exaggerating the truth in Veronica, as she mentions that her eyes are that way because she was trying to stop herself from “seeing shadows”.Â
Read More: Sister Death Movie Review