Black Narcissus - Season 1

"Black Narcissus" is a beautiful production but its melancholic tone is a hard sell to keep audiences sustained over three episodes.

It struggles for three hours to justify its existence.

It is succinct and well-told in the three hour-long episodes... But there are characters and themes that certainly could have benefited from intelligent expansion.

Too long to be a movie and too short to satisfy as a miniseries, this "Black Narcissus" dabbles in being all of the above, and, alas, doesn't fully succeed at any of them. But it doesn't deserve a thumbs-down review, either.

We're left with plot points from the novel explained in more detail than in Powell and Pressburger's film, a novelistic but unexciting take on the material.

The result is visually beautiful. The series is solidly acted, occasionally expansive and never something I would ever choose to watch again rather than just checking in on the old friend that is the 1947 film.

Although everything is presented more directly than it was in the discreet 1940s, the repressed emotions, as well as their outbursts, fail to stir blood as effectively.

Clodagh and Ruth are the roles to play here, and Arterton and Franciosi embody them beautifully.

Psychologically intense and erotically charged, Black Narcissus doesn't entirely resist the temptation of lurid melodrama, but Diana Rigg brings a little dignity in one of her last roles, as the Mother Superior who sends them off.

What ultimately holds everything and everyone together is Clodagh, who is at constant odds with Ruth but tirelessly attempts to bring her close and help her troubled mind.

I can't say adequately describe how extraordinary is FX' new three-part series Black Narcissus.

As a cross between Sofia Coppola's version of "The Beguiled" and Martin Scorsese's "Silence," "Black Narcissus" works, but anyone craving legitimate spookiness should look elsewhere.