Black Narcissus Movie PosterAt first glance, the premise of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s film Black Narcissus (1947) was one that I was not entirely excited to see. The story about a group of nuns sent out to the high hilltops of the Himalayan Mountains to establish a school and hospital sounded drab to me. By its end, though, I was riveted. The film is about so much more than just nuns; it is about the repressed emotions and passions that come with vowing to become one. That’s where the true tension of The Archers’ (as Powell and Pressburger were known) story is set: in seeing who will be able to keep themselves in control, and who will fall in to the dark side and allow this new and amazing world to encompass them. It is a film about bold colors and enormous landscapes, about tension and eroticism boiling beneath the façades that our characters so desperately try to put up.