The Nun's StoryMovies like The Nun's Story
- Key Features:
- Nun, Faith, World War II, Crisis of faith, Devotion, Sacrifice, Internal conflict, Moral dilemma, Biopic, Adaptation, Spiritual journey
- Tone:
- serious, dramatic, restrained
- Target Audience:
- Fans of classic cinema, Viewers interested in religious themes, Those interested in historical dramas, People who appreciate character-driven stories
- Emotional Arc:
- Idealism → Doubt
The Nun's Story

After leaving a wealthy Belgian family to become a nun, Sister Luke struggles with her devotion to her vows during crisis, disappointment, and World War II.
The Nun's Story
In the early 1960s, during the Vatican II era, a young woman training to become a nun struggles with issues of faith, sexuality and the changing church.

Suzanne Simonin describes her life of suffering in letters. As a young woman she is sent to a convent against her will. Since her parents cannot afford the dowry required for a marriage befitting her rank they decide she must instead become a nun. Although a kind and understanding Mother Superior helps her to learn the convent’s daily routine, Suzanne’s desire for freedom remains unabated. When the Mother Superior dies, Suzanne finds herself faced with reprisals, humiliation and harassment at the hands of the new Abbess and the other Sisters. For many years, Suzanne is subjected to bigotry and religious fanaticism. (Berlinale.de)

In eighteenth-century France, a girl is forced against her will to take vows as a nun. Three mothers superior treat her in radically different ways, ranging from maternal concern, to sadistic persecution, to lesbian desire.

A biography of the Belgian nun Jeannine Deckers, who became a popular singer in the early 1960s and struggled with the contradiction between the church and her true self.

A 17th-century nun becomes entangled in a forbidden lesbian affair with a novice. But it is Benedetta's shocking religious visions that threaten to shake the Church to its core.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, the nun Maria is forced to flee her convent. She takes refuge in a brothel, until it is liberated by a woman's anarchist group. Maria joins the group and eventually goes to the front. The women's group faces the problems of fighting not only the nationalists, but also factions on the left seeking to impose a more traditional military structure.

In 1956 France, a priest is violently murdered, and Sister Irene begins to investigate. She once again comes face-to-face with a powerful evil.

A priest with a dark past and a novice nearing her final vows are sent by the Vatican to Romania to investigate a nun's death and face a demonic force.

Sister Emanuelle and Sister Nanà go to meet Mr. Cazzabriga, who has a problem: his wild-child daughter, Monica, who he wants to send to a Catholic school to remove her from temptations around the house.

Under the German occupation, in a small French town, the arrival of a new priest arouses the interest of all women... Barny, a young communist and atheist woman, can not however be more indifferent. Driven by curiosity, the young skeptic went to the church in order to challenge this.

In 1964 Bronx, two Catholic school nuns question the new priest's ambiguous relationship with a troubled African-American student.

A demented nun sliding through morphine addiction into madness, while presiding over a regime of lesbianism, torture and death. Sister Gertrude is the head nurse/nun in a general hospital, whose increasingly psychotic behavior endangers the staff and patients around her.

Poland, 1945. Mathilde, a young French Red Cross doctor, is on a mission to help the war survivors. When a nun seeks for her help, she is brought to a convent where several pregnant sisters are hiding, unable to reconcile their faith with their pregnancy. Mathilde becomes their only hope.

Years ago, a cruel and merciless nun turned a boarding school into a living hell for her students until they could no longer bear the abuse, and she mysteriously disappeared. Now the alumnae are being brutally murdered one by one.

A virtuous monk descends to the depths of sin and depravity after Satan sends an unholy temptress to lead him astray.

An American nun embarks on a new journey when she joins a remote convent in the Italian countryside. However, her warm welcome quickly turns into a living nightmare when she discovers her new home harbours a sinister secret and unspeakable horrors.

Three young Irish women struggle to maintain their spirits while they endure dehumanizing abuse as inmates of a Magdalene Sisters Asylum.

France, World War II. In order to somehow make ends meet, the mother of two children, Marie Latour, does underground abortions and rents a room to a familiar prostitute. She doesn't pay any attention to her husband, who returned from the war because of his injury and lives her own life. Abortions gradually begin to bring a good income, and boredom can be easily dispelled by starting a young lover.

A troubled young woman is thrown out of a convent and forms a relationship with a radical Muslim.

Desperation drives two nuns to perform an exorcism no nun should attempt. With a possessed child at the mercy of evil and the opposition of the Catholic Church, they take on the dangerous forbidden rituals themselves, putting their immortal souls in grave danger. They must confront the terrifying cost of their sacrilegious actions, but one goal remains: the boy must be saved at all costs.

During the 17th century, a young woman is saved from execution and led to a priory to repent her sins but discovers a greater evil lies within.

A middle-aged woman leaves her partner and drifts back to her ex-husband, while the lives of her middle class friends intersect with her own.

A zealous, handsome priest, who is the confessor for a convent full of women, encourages the equally zealous abbess of the institution to enforce strict rules on these unfortunate women. At the same time, a particularly disturbed nun manages to poison herself and many of the other novitiates in yet another scandal which is covered up by church authorities.

An unemployed construction worker heading out west stops at a remote farm in the desert to get water when his car overheats. The farm is being worked by a group of East European Catholic nuns, headed by the strict mother superior, who believes the man has been sent by God to build a much needed church in the desert.

Barny, although a Marxist, is intrigued by the mysteries of religion. In confession, she teases a priest, Léon Morin, but he is a young and intelligent man and ready to discuss anything.

After returning to her childhood home, young nun Colleen finds her old room exactly how she left it: painted black and covered in goth and metal posters. Her parents are happy enough to see her, but her brother is living as a recluse in the guesthouse since returning home from the Iraq war.

Without a family, penniless and separated from her sister, a beautiful chaste woman will have to cope with an endless parade of villains, perverts and degenerates who will claim not only her treasured virtue but also her life.

After the alleged suicide of her priest brother, Grace travels to the remote Scottish convent where he fell to his death. Distrusting the Church's account, she uncovers murder, sacrilege and a disturbing truth about herself.

In order to escape her isolation, wheelchair-bound Christine makes a life changing journey to Lourdes, the iconic site of pilgrimage in the Pyrenees Mountains.

The deeply held religious convictions of an idealistic young priest are challenged when he must face extraordinary events within his own congregation.

Viridiana is preparing to start her life as a nun when she is sent, somewhat unwillingly, to visit her aging uncle, Don Jaime. He supports her; but the two have met only once. Jaime thinks Viridiana resembles his dead wife. Viridiana has secretly despised this man all her life and finds her worst fears proven when Jaime grows determined to seduce his pure niece. Viridiana becomes undone as her uncle upends the plans she had made to join the convent.

A Roman Catholic nun and a hard-bitten US Marine are stranded together on a Japanese-occupied island in the South Pacific during World War II. Under constant threat of discovery by a ruthless enemy, they hide in a cave and forage for food together. Their forced companionship and the struggle for survival forge a powerful emotional bond between them.

A strong-willed peasant girl is sent by her father to the estate of some local aristocrats to capitalize on a rumor that their families are from the same line, but is left traumatised from her experiences.

Spain, 1949. Narcisa, a novice, arrives at an old convent, converted into a girls' school, to work as a teacher.

When a dead newborn is found, wrapped in bloody sheets, in the bedroom wastebasket of a young novice, psychiatrist Martha Livingston is called in to determine if the seemingly innocent novice, who knows nothing of sex or birth, is competent enough to stand trial for the murder of the baby.

The story of a streetwise party girl who gets mixed up in a violent drug deal and finds a possible way out - by masquerading as a Catholic nun.

Nelie escaped a miserable existence by becoming a frontline nurse in 1914. One day, she takes the identity of Rose, a young woman from a good family, who dies in front of her. She presents herself in her place at Madame de Lengwil's house, to become the reader of this wealthy woman.

A faithful Jehovah's Witness is forced to shun her own sister because of a religious transgression. As the separation draws out, she starts to question the meaning of God's love.

Three women in a maternity ward share their lives and intimate thoughts, and face the choice of keeping their babies or offering them for adoption.

With their father away as a chaplain in the Civil War, Jo, Meg, Beth and Amy grow up with their mother in somewhat reduced circumstances. They are a close family who inevitably have their squabbles and tragedies. But the bond holds even when, later, male friends start to become a part of the household.

When a priest is jailed for the murder of a nun on whom he was performing an exorcism, an investigative journalist strives to determine whether he in fact murdered a mentally ill person, or if he lost the battle with a demonic presence.

Anne and Lore, neighbors and best friends, barely into their teens, board at a convent school where they have taken a vow to sin and to serve Satan. Anne keeps a secret diary, they read a salacious novel, they get a classmate in trouble, they spy on the nuns, they set aside their communion wafers; they make a pact of devotion.

Sister Maria is known in the convent for her good works and charity, but, in the secret depths of her sexual fantasies, she is tormented by visions of another world - a world where her forbidden passions are allowed to run free. In this world Satan is her master. As her acts of violence and blasphemy mount, Maria realizes that she has been chosen by the Devil to destroy the convent and lead her sister nuns into hell!

Claire is a midwife and has devoted her life to others. At a moment when she is preoccupied by the imminent closure of the maternity clinic where she works, her life is further turned upside down when Béatrice, her father's former mistress, turns up on the scene. Béatrice is a capricious and selfish woman, Claire's exact opposite.

In 1930s France, two sisters who are thought to be able to communicate with ghosts meet a visionary producer while performing in Paris.

When a priest hears a murderer’s confession, he becomes bound by his vow of silence—even as circumstantial evidence turns suspicion toward him. Torn between faith and self-preservation, he faces public scandal and trial for a crime he cannot reveal the truth about.

Sonja Wigert, Scandinavia's most acclaimed female movie star, enlists as a spy for Swedish intelligence but ends up becoming entangled with the German Reichskommissar Terboven.

A young widow flees from Rome during WWII and takes her lonely twelve-year-old-daughter to her rural hometown but the horrors of war soon catch up with them.

Maria finds herself caught between two worlds. At school this 14-year-old girl has all the typical teenage interests, but when she’s at home with her family she follows the teachings of the Society of St. Paul and their traditionalist interpretation of Catholicism. Everything that Maria thinks and does must be examined before God. And since the Lord is a strict shepherd, she lives in constant fear of committing some misconduct...

A priest, after spending years in humanitary missions in Africa, reunites with his family, which is in worse conditions than when he left, and above all meets a young lady who will make him doubt both himself and his faith.

As a top student at St. Adeline's Catholic Boarding School, Zoe senses that something is not quite right about the school's new nun-- a sense proven to be true when it is revealed the "good' nun is an imposter with a fatal attraction to Zoe's brother.

Growing up in the sheltered confines of a 1920s English coal-mining community, free-spirited sisters Gudrun and Ursula explore erotic love with a wealthy playboy and a philosophical educator, with cataclysmic results for all four.

Having recently found God, self-effacing young nurse Maud arrives at a plush home to care for Amanda, a hedonistic dancer left frail from a chronic illness. When a chance encounter with a former colleague throws up hints of a dark past, it becomes clear there is more to sweet Maud than meets the eye.

Louise meets Nathan, her dreams resurface. It's also the story of her ailing brother, their mother, and the destiny of a leading family of wealthy Italian industrialists. The story of a family falling apart, a world coming to an end and love beginning.

In response to a global rise in demonic possessions, the Catholic Church reopens exorcism schools to train priests in the Rite of Exorcism. On this spiritual battlefield, an unlikely warrior rises: a young nun, Sister Ann. Thrust onto the spiritual frontline with fellow student Father Dante, Sister Ann finds herself in a battle for the soul of a young girl and soon realizes the Devil has her right where he wants her.

Mary and her friend, Rachel, are new students at St. Francis Academy, a boarding school run by the iron fist of Mother Superior. The immature teens grow bored and begin playing pranks on both the unsuspecting nuns and their unpleasant classmates, becoming a constant thorn in Mother Superior's side. However, as the years pass, Mary and Rachel slowly mature and begin to see the nuns in a different light.

Michaela, an epileptic, enrolls in college to study education. She goes off her medication and soon begins hearing voices and seeing apparitions that tell her to avoid religious objects, although she is devoutly Roman Catholic. One priest scoffs at the idea that Michaela could be possessed by demons, but a younger pastor arranges an exorcism for the young woman.

Upon taking her vows to become a nun, Sister Sarah is abused, brainwashed and also drugged into submission by the corrupt clergy. On the verge of her own death from a lethal dose of drugs, Sister Sarah receives a message from God telling her to take vengeance on all those who did wrong to her. Armed with God's will and an arsenal of big guns, she dispenses Judgment Day on her former tormentors. When the church hires the merciless motorcycle gang "Los Muertos" to track down and to kill her they soon realize that this sister is one bad mother.

As Agnes slowly dies of cancer, her sisters are so immersed in their own psychic pains that they are unable to offer her the support she needs.

In Argentina, one daughter of patriarch Madariaga is married to a Frenchman while the other is married to a German thus leading to a crisis when Nazi Germany occupies France and some Madariaga family members fight on opposite sides.

During the early 16th century, idealistic German monk Martin Luther, disgusted by the materialism in the church, begins the dialogue that will lead to the Protestant Reformation.

A Polish priest arrives at a convent hoping to save the Mother Superior who is supposedly possessed by eight demons.

1920s Germany. Two sisters aged six years, no sooner see their remaining parent buried when they are torn apart. Lotte goes to live with her upper middle class Dutch aunt in Holland, Anna to work as a farm hand on her German uncle's rural farm. The World War II impacts each of their lives and finally in old age they meet again.

St. Agatha is set in the 1950s in small town Georgia. A pregnant con woman named Agatha is on the run and seeks refuge in a convent hidden in deafening isolation. What first starts out as the perfect place to have a child turns into a dark lair where silence is forced. Ghastly secrets are masked, and every bit of will power Agatha has is tested. She soon learns the sick and twisted truth of the convent and the odd people that lurk inside its halls. Agatha must now find a way to discover the unyielding strength needed to escape and save her baby before she’s caged behind these walls forever.

A group of college students break into an abandoned convent and become possessed by demonic spirits.

During the Blitz of World War II, a female screenwriter works on a film celebrating England's resilience as a way to buoy a weary populace's spirits. Her efforts to dramatise the true story of two sisters who undertook their own maritime mission to rescue wounded soldiers are met with mixed feelings by a dismissive all-male staff.

An unprecedented and intimate look at the life, work and enduring legacy of British actress Audrey Hepburn (1929-1993).

A young woman who has been in and out from rehab for the past 10 years returns home for the weekend for her sister's wedding.

In a mission in China in 1935, a group of women are preyed on by Mongolian bandits, led by Warlord chief Tunga Khan.

Thomas is a drug addict. In an effort to put an end to his habit, he joins a community of former addicts who live isolated in the mountains and use prayer as a way to cure themselves.

A damaged young woman is looking forward to moving to a beautiful new home, but the spirit of a deranged nun wants her to stay right where she is.

In his delirium from his return from war, Francesco Bernardone goes back in his memories to the days when he lived for parties and carnal pleasures. He slowly recovers, but after the illness he is no longer the Francesco that everybody knew. Instead of spending hours in taverns, he meditates on the beauty of God's creatures, soon renouncing his riches and his family with plans to rebuild an abandoned church and his life.

Fanny Price is sent to live with her wealthy relatives, the Bertrams, where she is treated poorly by most except her cousin Edmund. Her life is complicated by the arrival of the worldly Mary and Henry Crawford.

In the 1890s, Father Adolf Daens goes to Aalst, a textile town where child labor is rife, pay and working conditions are horrible, the poor have no vote, and the Catholic church backs the petite bourgeoisie in oppressing workers. He writes a few columns for the Catholic paper, and soon workers are listening and the powerful are in an uproar. He's expelled from the Catholic party, so he starts the Christian Democrats and is elected to Parliament. After Rome disciplines him, he must choose between two callings, as priest and as champion of workers. In subplots, a courageous young woman falls in love with a socialist and survives a shop foreman's rape; children die; prelates play billiards.

18 years after the mysterious death of her mother, Maya takes religious vows to find out what terrible things happened to her mother inside the Sacred Heart Convent. As soon as the door closes to the nunnery, the nuns start torturing her. She also has to deal with a lecherous archbishops and a lesbian mother superior.

Margaret is a nurse in England during WW2, and married to a secret agent. Things get complicated when she falls for David, an American pilot.

In the 1930s, a young reverend and his family are forced to confront their worst fears when they discover their new home holds a horrifying secret.

Marie Heurtin is born both blind and deaf. Sister Marguerette wins her trust and teaches her how to express herself.

When a Priest and a Vatican investigator take a possessed housewife to a convent to perform an Exorcism, all hell breaks loose....

A former prostitute works to create a new life for herself in a small town, but a shocking discovery could threaten everything.

Rural England, 1865. Katherine, suffocated by her loveless marriage to a bitter man and restrained by his father's tyranny, unleashes an irresistible force within her, so powerful that she will stop at nothing to get what she wants.

A Reno singer witnesses a mob murder and the cops stash her in a nunnery to protect her from the mob's hitmen. The mother superior does not trust her, and takes steps to limit her influence on the other nuns. Eventually the singer rescues the failing choir and begins helping with community projects, which gets her an interview on TV—and identification by the mob.

In 1905, after 10 years of missionary work in Africa, the Rev. Charles Fortesque is recalled to England, where his bishop gives him his new assignment - to minister to London's prostitutes.

Simone inherits a dilapidated farmhouse in France and makes her way there with her husband Eric and their two children. Her dream is to turn the house into a bed and breakfast but as the hectic pace of the rebuilding gets underway, she gets caught up in the romance and chaos of it all. Losing sight of her goals, she must find her way back to the dreams and ambitions which brought her there in the first place.

Following the murder of her family at the hands of her father in the wake of World War I, a young woman is sent to live in a convent. However, the demons that plagued her father follow, reawakening the nightmares of her past.

Brian and Charlie work for a gangster. When the boss learns they want to "leave" he sets them up to be killed, after they help rob the local Triads of their drug dealing profits. Brian and Charlie decides to steal the money for themselves, but when their escape doesn't go to plan, they have to seek refuge in a Nuns' teacher training school.

André Demester secretly and painfully loves Barbe, his childhood friend, accepting from her the little that she gives him. He leaves home to be a soldier in a war in a far off land. Barbarity, camaraderie and fear turn him into a warrior. As the seasons go by, Barbe, alone and wasting away, waits for the soldiers to return. Will Demester’s boundless love for Barbe save him?

A new student, Manuela, enters a strict girls' boarding school after her mother’s death, where she finds comfort in a kind teacher, stirring complex emotions within her.

A group of women in an isolated religious colony struggle to reconcile their faith with a series of sexual assaults committed by the colony's men.

A young woman with no strong religious beliefs, Frankie Paige begins having strange and violent experiences, showing signs of the wounds that Jesus received when crucified. When the Vatican gets word of Frankie's situation, a high-ranking cardinal requests that the Rev. Andrew Kiernan investigate her case. Soon Kiernan realizes that very sinister forces are at work, and tries to rescue Frankie from the entity that is plaguing her.

A young nurse, Alma, is put in charge of Elisabeth Vogler: an actress who is seemingly healthy in all respects, but will not talk. As they spend time together, Alma speaks to Elisabeth constantly, never receiving any answer.

19 year old Irena Gut is promoted to housekeeper in the home of a highly respected Nazi officer in Poland when she finds out that the Jewish ghetto is about to be liquidated. Determined to help twelve Jewish workers, she decides to shelter them in the safest place she can think of – the basement of the German Major's house. Over the next eight months, Irena uses her wit, humour and immense courage to hide her friends as long as possible.

Kitty runs a brothel in Nazi Germany where the soldiers come to "relax". Recording devices have been installed in each room by a power hungry army official who plans to use the information to blackmail Hitler and gain power himself. A girl named Margherita discovers the little ploy and with Kitty's help plans to take on the dangerous task of exposing the conspiracy.

Jesus, a humble Judean carpenter beginning to see that he is the son of God, is drawn into revolutionary action against the Roman occupiers by Judas -- despite his protestations that love, not violence, is the path to salvation. The burden of being the savior of mankind torments Jesus throughout his life, leading him to doubt.

A death row inmate turns for spiritual guidance to a local nun in the days leading up to his scheduled execution for the murders of a young couple.

Dorota Geller, a married woman, faces a dilemma involving her sick husband's prognosis. Her husband's doctor, who believes in God, sweared about it in vain.

Missionary Father LaForgue travels to the New World in hopes of converting Algonquin Indians to Catholicism. Accepted, though warily, by the Indians, LaForgue travels with the Indians using his strict Catholic rules and ideals to try and impose his religion.

The daughter of a thief, young Moll is placed in the care of a nunnery after the execution of her mother. However, the actions of an abusive priest lead Moll to rebel as a teenager, escaping to the dangerous streets of London. Further misfortunes drive her to accept a job as a prostitute from the conniving Mrs. Allworthy. It is there that Moll first meets Hibble, who is working as Allworthy's servant but takes a special interest in the young woman's well-being. With his help, she retains hope for the future, ultimately falling in love with an unconventional artist who promises the possibility of romantic happiness.

