Days from taking her vows, the novice Viridiana (Silvia Pinal) is persuaded to visit the uncle who has paid for her upbringing and whom she barely knows. Don Jaime (Fernando Rey) receives her with a courtly warmth that turns out to conceal an obsession with his long-dead wife, and what he sets in motion drives Viridiana from the convent for good. She stays on at the estate and opens it to the local beggars — only to discover that her charity is no sturdier than his nostalgia. Luis Buñuel’s first film made in Spain after decades of exile took the Palme d’Or and a Vatican denunciation in the same year, and it remains his most mordant account of piety undone by appetite.
