Cate Blanchett gives it the full wimple as cantankerous alcoholic nun Sister Eileen in Warwick Thornton’s woozily mystical and slightly unfocused drama set in a remote outback Catholic orphanage in 1940s wartime Australia - and really only a period setting would give us the spectacle of Blanchett in the complete picturesque nun outfit, now a rarity in the modern age.
Blanchett brings to it a fierce authority born of repressed emotion in the time honoured nuns-on-film manner - although she can’t match Kathleen Byron’s troubled nun in Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus.
