Silence and secret: A minimalist guide to abuse in cinema

From Stanley Kubrick to Pedro Almodóvar, cinema helps understand the underpinnings of abuse.

Documentaries and fictional works help to figure out what are the dynamics behind abuse and, perhaps, how to prevent it.

By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez

Cinema has been a tool to try to understand the world around us. Movies follow in that respect paths originally traced by literature, serving a purpose that goes well beyond the notion of entertainment or past time.

It is a tradition dating back in the Spanish-speaking world to the The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes, a 16th century picaresque novella, whose main character witnesses the many contradictions of Catholic clergy.

The novel is seminal in several ways, as offers glimpses into the roots of such contradictions lying at the heart of clericalism, the pursue of advantages and privileges through an ecclesiastical career, despite the alleged vocation to service of others, the neighbor, in the most basic understanding of Catholic theology.

Even if Lazarillo attempts at points a humorous understanding of the protagonist suffering, a young male forced to serve clerics, the glimpses it offers at the root of such suffering point at the betrayal of the ecclesiastical career.

Movies also offer such glimpses into the root cause of abuse, sexual or otherwise, of minor and adults, males and females. What follows is an attempt at finding a minimal, the most basic set of movies dealing with the very complex issue of abuse in religious and other settings.

It is an attempt at identifying movies that help to understand abuse, sexual or otherwise, in religious or other settings. The list reflects the kind of concerns moving the ongoing series published here at Los Angeles Press, so it emphasizes the patterns of institutional overreach, and the mechanisms used to enforce silence

The films are grouped by date of release, and the feature of abuse they focus on. None of these movies belong only to a single category, and even those with little or no actual reference to religious ideas, practice or beliefs, allow to better understand how and why abuse in religious settings happens.

1. The weaponization of religion

The films in this category showcase how religious dogma, spiritual authority, and religious structures are actively and deliberately corrupted and used as tools for abuse and control, from the local structures of a parish or a diocese, to national and even international settings.

• The crime of Father Amaro Mexico 2002 and Portugal 2005.

Based on the 19th century eponymous novel by Portuguese author Eça de Queiroz, that remains relevant to understand Catholic culture worldwide.

Its plot depicts the Church hierarchy’s conflicted understanding of power and their own duties, and how such understanding leads to practices marred by complicity and ambiguity. The original novel and the films inspired by it, depict how a young priest’s quest for power and influence intermingles with his superiors’ similar but far more elaborate pursuits.

The most powerful revision introduced by Vicente Leñero in the Mexican 2002 version is how the young priest, Father Amaro, contradicts his own alleged anti-abortion beliefs by coercing the young woman, Amelia, into a fatal abortion to protect his reputation.

Similarly, his superiors commit a similar moral compromise, accepting cartel funding for their pursuits, such as building a hospital. In both cases, Catholic clergy prioritizes political power and wealth over moral mission.

Three years later, Portugal produced another rendition of the novel, retold in contemporary European settings, highlighting similar tensions and contradictions between alleged religious beliefs and actual practices among the Catholic Church’s hierarchy.

• La mala educación (Bad Education 2004, Spain)

Pedro Almodóvar’s take on clergy sexual abuse revolves around a story in a Catholic boys’ school in 1960s Francoist Spain, moving over the later 20th century in a complex plot. The sexual abuse of the characters anchors the narrative, with the usual references in Almodóvar’s films to the fluidity of sexual identity.

It depicts abuse of authority within the context of systemic corruption and secret through the story of a priest abusing students and who, later, one would guess with the Church’s endorsement tries to silence and co-opt the victims with money.

It also shows how, despite the official philosophical stand of most religions, religion has the potential to become the source of pervasive violence, against victims of abuse, and against predators themselves.

• Doubt (2008, USA)

Set as a drama in a fictional Bronx Catholic school in 1964 it is an accurate account of intra-clergy dynamics as a nun, the school’s headmistress, grows suspicious a relationship between a young male student, the sole black kid in the school, and a popular priest, serving the school as chaplain.

The complex plot depicts how a culture of silence and lies, so common to Catholic and other religious settings, facilitates the weaponization of religious beliefs against clerics themselves, while poisoning the waters of potential cooperation among them and communication with the lay persons they claim to serve.

Even if one was willing to take aim at Sister Aloysious (Merryl Streep’s character) use of falsehood to go after Father Brendan Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman), it is impossible not to wonder how many times an older nun such as her would have witnessed the very first stages of grooming leading to clergy sexual abuse.

Her intervention, morally questionable, even affected by racism, is more of an oblique critique of the lack of actual mechanisms to prevent abuse than a reflection of her own moral flaws. How many abuses could have been prevented if more nuns were willing to do what she did? In that respect, the movie’s depiction of the fraught dynamics between Sister Aloysius and Father Flynn is masterful.

• Obediencia Perfecta (Perfect Obedience 2014, Mexico)

Although the film avoids obvious references to Marcial Maciel and the Legion of Christ, going as far as to make some odd wardrobe choices, as the use of color in the cassocks of the seminarians, it is impossible to miss the similarities with the Mexican super predator.

From the very title, the film depicts abuse as the byproduct of a system aimed at totalitarian obedience, ultimately leading to violence and abuse. It proves how, paradoxically, the promise of spiritual perfection at the core of religious beliefs, facilitates abuse, undermining the idea of perfection, spiritual or otherwise.

The movie is notable for its use of a maze-like garden very similar to that of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, and some of its scenes, whether intentionally or not, can be seen as references, even homages, to Kubrick’s depiction of Jack Torrance’s relationship with his son.

• El Club (The Club 2015, Chile)

Produced and filmed in the aftermath of the Fernando Karadima scandal in Chile, The Club is a carefully crafted Chilean Gothic depiction of the Catholic Church's internal system of “punishment,” where exile becomes an evasion, as there is neither punishment nor reward. It is merely an attempt to prevent scandal while ultimately preventing actual justice for the victims.

It offers a glimpse into the systematic policy of hiding disgraced priests in secret houses of “penance” to shield the institution from accountability in the name of preventing scandal.

It does so with a rather dark, black humor showcasing the fragility of the Church’s alleged role as moral compass and the contradictory nature of the Church’s ideal of masculinity, as the four exiled priests are now under the soft power of a female who reports about their behavior to the hierarchy.

Audio in Spanish, with English subtitles.

The futility of the model is evident with the arrival of a fifth, and later a sixth priest. The fifth one, a pedophile, is a reminder of how the model used to “punish” them is useless, as he is yet another “member” of “the club,” while the sixth priest goes on behalf of the bishops merely managing the consequences of their crimes.

The film’s focus on the perpetrators alludes to the lack of actual justice for the Chilean victims. It also shows how the limbo the priests inhabit lacks any actual reckoning for the secluded priests or accountability for the institution still protecting them in their secluded but ultimately comfortable location.

It also highlights, even if negatively, the absence of any social acknowledgement of the dangers of certain practices in religious practices emerging in public trials happening elsewhere in the world.

• Kler (Clergy 2018, Poland)

This Polish film exposes priests involved in financial schemes, careerism, systemic moral decay and corruption, paradoxically performed in the name of preserving the influence and power of the Catholic Church in their country.

The three of them are as much victims as villains in the games of power draining most of the Catholic hierarchy’s energy all over the world. Even if the setting is unequivocally Polish, the themes resonate worldwide.

One of the issues is alcoholism among Catholic clergy. A major source of concern in the English-speaking Catholic world, as this story at U.S. Catholic proves, it remains a taboo in other countries.

Not that in only happens in the English-speaking world, it is only that there is far more will to be open about the issue in English-speaking Catholic media than its Latin American counterparts, where it is almost impossible for an honest criticism of priests to ever be published, unless it is about a priest challenging a more powerful member of the hierarchy.

The other issue is, of course, sexual abuse and the already known tale of how it is never the crime as such, but the cover-up what brings Cardinals, bishops, abbots and other superiors down.

2. Exposing the systemic cover-up

This category combines, unlike the previous one, creative and documentary movies. All of them are concerned with uncovering the mechanisms used by the Catholic hierarchy in different countries to dismiss concerns, protect their own members, and avoid accountability.

• The Magdalene Sisters (2002, Ireland/UK)

The first entry in this category is a demolishing, fact-based, account of one of the darkest, ugliest, episodes in the history of clergy sexual abuse as it involves the so-called Magdalene Laundries or Asylums in Ireland, a network of institutions run by Catholic nuns that imprisoned, exploited, and subjected thousands of young women to physical and psychological abuse.

Even if the film is a fictional account of the lives of three sisters, it provides a documentary-style record of institutionalized cruelty. The nuns, operating with the full moral authority of the Catholic hierarchy, enforced a system of forced labor and punitive confinement, proving how isolation and unchecked power in religious settings can lead to systemic human rights abuses.

The film played a role in debates in Ireland and the United Kingdom about religious-based violence. In Ireland, the debate eventually forced setting a national commission to probe the violence in the so-called laundries. Eventually, the Irish government published a report, a formal apology, and compensation for some of the victims.

• Deliver Us from Evil (2006, USA)

This was, at its time, a groundbreaking documentary, released in the midst of the tumultuous process leading to the 2007 settlement of several cases of clergy sexual abuse perpetrated by priests associated to the archdiocese of Los Angeles.

The documentary is actually focused in one of the most noted predators whose crimes were settled then: Irish priest Oliver Francis O’Grady, who was originally associated to the diocese of Stockton, when future archbishop of Los Angeles, Roger Mahony, was the bishop there (1980-5), before John Paul II appointed him to Los Angeles.

O’Grady admitted to having abused at least 25 underage males in Northern California. The film is based on testimonies from his survivors, O’Grady's own confessions and court documents to prove that Catholic Church officials in California were aware of the abuse he was perpetrating as early as 1976.

Instead of setting any kind of limit, officials at the Catholic dioceses of Stockton and Los Angeles allowed O’Grady to continue in ministry, through continuous reassignments to new locations where he was able to find new victims.

His case is as close as possible as that of Mexican priest Nicolás Aguilar Rivera, who was sent to Los Angeles by Norberto Rivera Carrera, while he was, in the 1980s, bishop of Tehuacán, in the Mexican state of Puebla.

• Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God (2012, USA)

This documentary follows cases and the cover-up of such cases from the school level all the way to Rome, highlighting the role of bishops and Cardinals.

Despite its relatively narrow focus in the massive abuse of at least 200 deaf underage males at the Saint John School for the Deaf in Wisconsin, a charity associated to the archdiocese of Milwaukee from the 1950s through the 1970s, it is a perfect example of abuse of disabled underage populations in religious settings.

The documentary is relevant also because it provides a precise account of how the Catholic Church balked at proceeding with an internal (canonical) trial against Lawrence Murphy, the predator priest who abused the deaf kids.

A trial against Murphy was already on its way, but Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger halted the process during his tenure at what is now the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith.

But also, because back in 2002 John Paul II sent to that diocese the current archbishop of New York, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, to perform what is perceived as a clean-up operation. Dolan has a questionable record of addressing clergy sexual abuse cases in other dioceses under his authority.

The case is relevant not only in the United States as a few years later, in Argentina, a carbon-copy case emerged in Western Argentina at a similar school for deaf children. The school used to be managed by a small order originally founded in Italy, back in the 19th century.

The main difference between the St. John School for the Deaf and the Instituto Próvolo in the city of Mendoza, capital of the eponymous province in Western Argentina, is that in the Próvolo abuse was perpetrated not by an isolated priest as Murphy, but by four priests: Nicola Corradi, Eliseo Primati and Luigi Spinelli, Italian nationals living in Argentina at the time of the abuse, and Argentine national Horacio Curbacho.

They had as accomplices lay persons such as gardener Armando Gómez, and Kumiko Kusaka, a nun associated then to the female branch of the Antonio Próvolo Institute for the Deaf, as the order is known in the English-speaking world.

• Spotlight (2015, USA)

Probably the most notable of any of the movies dealing with clergy sexual abuse, it is not a documentary, but it is classified as a biographical. However, its style is as close as possible to a documentary of what happened abuse-wise in the archdiocese of Boston over several decades.

Even if it is impossible to say when abuse begun there, the movie centers around the investigative journalism done by the Spotlight division of The Boston Globe, the preeminent daily in Boston over the last century or so, at the end of the 20th century, when the number of cases was such that there was no way to keep hiding the truth.

In that respect, the film provides an account of both the logistics of cover-up as performed by the archdiocese of Boston, especially during Cardinal Bernard Law’s tenure there, while offering glimpses into other aspects of the crisis.

Among them, one finds difficulties faced by the media, even established, legacy media such as The Boston Globe, and lawyers, advocates, relatives, and the very victims of clergy sexual abuse to achieve justice. Equally, there are oblique views of the role of local police, district attorneys, politicians, and even judges facilitating impunity for religious leaders.

Even if what Spotlight offers on those issues is far from a comprehensive explanation of what happened in those other realms, the sketches offered by director Tom McCarthy is extremely valuable.

• Grâce à Dieu (By the Grace of God 2018, France)

In a nutshell, the film follows three adult men (Alexandre, François and Emmanuel) decades after being victims of abuse as underage males of priest Bernard Preynat.

The movie focuses on Alexandre discovering Preynat is still working with children at the archdiocese of Lyon. It goes into the details of how him and his fellow victims contact Church officials, including the archbishop and Cardinal Philippe Barbarin.

After the usual scandal, heightened by the emergence of many other cases in France, Europe and the world, Barbarin admits Church officials knew about Preynat's conduct for years but failed to remove him from his position allowing for the promotion he bestowed upon Preynat. It was that promotion what sparked Alexandre’s attention.

Audio in French, subtitles available at the YouTube Control Panel

According to the now public record, by 2020 it was known that Preynat had abused, between 1971 and 1991, at least 80 underage males who were members of the French Boy Scouts.

And even worse, now it is known that already while he was a seminarian, his superiors were aware of his predatory behavior. Back in the 1960s, Rome allowed him to take a break from seminary formation to attend therapy at the Vinatier Psychiatric Hospital between 1967 and 1968.

Moreover, Preynat himself acknowledges then archbishop of Lyon, Cardinal Alexandre Renard was aware of his case, and yet he authorized his ordination.

After Preynat’s 2016 conviction for sexual abuse committed between 1986 and 1991, he received an 18-months’ jail sentence, which was immediately suspended.

Eventually, Preynat would be subject to a new trial. In March 2020, he was sentenced to five-years in prison for sexually assaulting underage males. Despite his reticence to acknowledge wrongdoing, the scandal forced Cardinal Barbarin to resign his position as archbishop of Lyon when he was only 69, six years before the canonical age of retirement.

Other cases of high-ranking clergymen in France at the time made Barbarin’s position untenable. Less than six months before Barbarin’s resignation, the apostolic nuncio to France, Italian archbishop Luigi Ventura, grabbed the French media headlines when he was forced to resign his position in the midst of a scandal having him sexually assaulting male employees of the Parisian government.

• Examen de conciencia (Examination of Conscience 2019, Spain)

This is a series integrated by three episodes dealing with abuse at schools of the Marist Brothers in Spain.

Putting aside the specifics of the cases considered, it is notable that the same order has confronted similar accusations of abuse over the last 30 years or so in Australia, Chile, Mexico, and New Zealand, among other countries.

Although the order as such has no priests of their own, the local bishops where they operate assign chaplains, temporary or permanent, to attend the spiritual needs of the students in these schools.

Also, even if the members of the congregation are not priests, they exert authority over the students at their schools. They own the schools, so a brother is often the headmaster of the school, while others teach or have some other assignment in the school’s structure of authority.

Director Albert Sol emphasizes the structural or institutional roots of impunity in Spain. It is not only clergy sexual abuse victims who suffer what the series depicts, but victims of abuse and sexual violence in any setting as there is an extremely strict statute of limitations that expire before victims are able to speak out.

• Prey (2019, Canada)

This documentary follows a survivor pursuing a civil lawsuit against the Basilian Fathers of Toronto.

It provides an accurate, gut-wrenching, account of how the Basilian Fathers, a Canadian Catholic religious order, manipulated its country’s judiciary system to shield predator priest William Hodgson Marshall.

His long record of abuse emerged in 2010, when he was already 88, and his former students, already in their late sixties and early seventies, came forward with the usual account of abuse in all-male Catholic schools from the 1950s and 1960s.

One of the cases involved the sexual assault of a student and basketball player at the Saint Michael’s school in Windsor, a small city in Ontario, right on the border with the United States. Marshall was already in his early 30s, while his victim was a 15-year-old student under his care.

The documentary offers a glimpse of how far Catholic dioceses and orders are willing to go in their quest to exonerate or, overall, to minimize the scale of clergy sexual abuse. Probably not as far as Mexican dioceses willing to hire criminal defense lawyers associated with the drug cartels, but far enough as to bury victims in the paperwork of extremely complex and expensive trials.

A take-away from Matt Gallagher’s documentary is that the Church’s legal defense teams continue, in other venues and through other means, the institutional cover-up of predator priests.

3. Immunity through isolation. The power of closed worlds

The films in this category are, for the most part, works of fiction, but all of them have some grounding in documented reality. A key common trait is the isolation of their main characters, whether predators or victims, due to their own decision, the ability to accrue power, or because of extreme marginalization.

These closed worlds—convents, hotels, brothels, and elite societies—are shown to enforce a code of silence, granting immunity from external accountability.

The emergence of films capable of depicting the sexual and institutional conflicts in these closed worlds owes a debt to cinematic shifts in Europe, particularly the Italian Neorealism and French New Wave/Cinéma Vérité movements, going back to the late 1940s, which forced changes on the role of cinema and, more significantly on the rules of filmmaking, allowing for the exploration of issues previously considered taboo, including sexual behavior.

These changes allowed for less restrictive depictions of public and private life, including nudity and forms of violence that had been kept out of the then, so-called, silver screen, at least in the United States and the United Kingdom.

• Nunsploitation Subgenre (1961-?)

The first entry in this category is not actually a single film but a whole subgenre that came to exist as a consequence of several factors. The first, the emergence of then new scholarship about the private life and the so-called micro-history in Europe.

New research at the time on archives, church and civil, and new approaches to interpret existing knowledge about the past, elicited a renewed understanding of life in spaces dismissed by a more monument-like understanding of history dominant for the first half of the 20th century.

Looking at the history of the Lazarillo de Tormes novel, one finds that the most recent finding of an old edition of the book happened in 1992. A 1554 edition of the novel appeared hidden in a wall of a house in Barcarrota, in the autonomous region of Extremadura, Spain.

The book ended up hidden inside the wall because it was heavily censored by the Inquisition. Putting aside the value of a printing of a very popular book from the 16th century, the fact that the book ended up hidden, turns it a cultural fossil of sorts, revealing how relevant was the book for whoever tried to preserve it that way.

Similar discoveries or recoveries of old editions of books or of books entirely lost started to happen after the Second World War. Such developments allowed for a renewed understanding of the past, including the lives of priests, nuns, their communities, among many other social groups and private individuals.

It also coincided with the emergence of Michel Foucault’s renewed understanding of how power is not some sort of external energy, forced upon passive recipients, but the consequence of complex interactions between many actors, none of whom is an empty vessel. Hence the need to have a thorough, sophisticated understanding of the role of institutions in shaping behavior.

The genre or subgenre, depending on the criteria, is actually exploitative of the taboos of the era. It reflects the film making business attempt at competing with television, and even if the genre as such preceded other films dealing with horror and religion, it was later boosted by the popularity of other films of the era such as The Exorcist (1973 USA).

One of the Mexican entries in this subgenre, Satánico Pandemonium (1975, Mexico), actually made explicit the rather extraneous appeal to William Friedkin’s masterpiece in the limited publicity the Mexican film was able to get at the time in Spanish-speaking countries, where it would be advertised with a tag line blasting “La sexorcista”, a portmanteau of “sex” and “exorcist” in Spanish.

As sketchy and low brow as this genre could be, sometimes flirting with soft-porn and even the so-called snuff films, with depictions of the murder of victims, it popularized historical accounts of actual conflicts stemming from religious practice in European convents.

That was the case of the Polish film that started the subgenre as such, Matka Joanna od Aniołów (Mother, Joan of the Angels Poland, 1961), which is inspired by the so-called Loudun Possessions, a notorious episode in an Ursuline convent in Loudun, France in the 17th century.

Audio in Polish with English subtitles.

The original case has inspired over the centuries different renditions of its core issue in different media, and at least another movie in the same genre, the much more graphic, The Devils (United Kingdom 1971).

It is impossible to detail what actually happened at the convent. What matters is that the main characters of the story are the priest Urban Grandier and the nuns and lay females close to the convent become involved in out-of-ordinary sexual behavior.

Even if one goes with the most “lay” interpretation of the facts, the story at the origin of these two nunsploitation films has the unravelling of sexual behavior in the closed context of the convent playing a key role. The nuns’ unusual sexual behavior becomes a weapon used by members of the clergy to attack each other. Grandier, as an example, ended up burnt at the stake.

Moreover, given the “new” trend of increased revelations about the scale of the sexual abuse of nuns, novices, and other female members of the Catholic Church working in its structures, it is hard not to see the nunsploitation genre and its appeal as a forerunner of the denunciation of large scale sexual abuse of nuns as the one made by Sister Veronica Openibo during the summit on clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in Rome back in 2019.

• Taxi Driver (1976 USA)

Even if Taxi Driver is not centered on sexual abuse, it was a disruptive film having as a key feature of its extremely complex plot the abuse of Iris Steensma (Jodie Foster’s character) an underage girl becoming a prostitute in the streets of Manhattan.

But Iris is not the only victim. Travis Bickle, the cab driver, suffering what seems to be Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, is also a victim of his own experience in the Vietnam War. Ultimately both Iris and Travis will be revictimized by the easy-go-lucky false heroic narrative of Travis’s own violent and erratic behavior.

The narrative fits the media’s need for easy-to-digest, printable and marketable hero stories, and quick fixes, instead of actual healing, for the failing institutions.

Taxi Driver portrays, as a subplot, the use of Travis’s violent ways. The media turn Travis and his violent ways into a messiah of sorts to exonerate society of its failures that explain Iris as a child prostitute in what, otherwise, has been the most prosperous city of the world at least since the mid-19th century.

The film’s conflicting ending shows society embracing the simple, narrative of violence as redemption while ignoring several truths: Travis is a disturbed person coming back from a dehumanizing experience in a protracted colonial war, and Iris the very embodiment of child sexual abuse, with no actual resolution to either the violence behind Travis’s behavior or Iris’s situation.

• Pretty Baby (1978, USA)

Directed by Louis Malle, the film centers on twelve-year-old Violet who is growing up as the daughter of Hattie, a prostitute in a high-class brothel in New Orleans in the early 20th century. While not a religious institution, the brothel operates as a highly specialized social institution normalizing and profiting sexual exploitation, including that of a child.

Almost as it happens with the sequences of Iris walking the streets of Manhattan in Taxi Driver, it is unavoidable not to wonder why the highly stratified New Orleans society would be willing to allow for the auctioning of Violet’s virginity.

The most obvious failure lies in how power has to be interpreted not as some kind of resource mobilized at will, but as the byproduct of multiple formal and informal agreements taking the shape of social complicity. Otherwise, it would be impossible to understand how Violet becomes a prostitute at twelve.

There is a social contract of sorts allowing for the kind of “peaceful” violence endured by Violet when her virginity is sold in an auction, with her mother’s consent, unless one goes for easy explanations, targeting the mother as the culprit of whatever happens in that underworld.

The film reflects the kind of behavior that legitimizes violence perpetrated in religious institutions by those who have the power to exonerate themselves. If in Pretty Baby money does the trick on its own, in religious settings absolution through complicit confession, as practiced by many infamous Catholic predators, or exoneration through private Pentecostal revelation, does it.

Pretty Baby shows how closely knitted local structures create a closed world where the most vulnerable are stripped of fundamental rights for the pleasure of those exerting some form of power, having no external recourse or credible voice. Societies actively permit, ignore, or monetize abuse in geographically or socially secluded settings, whether the rough streets of 1970s Manhattan, or the upper-class brothels of early 20th century New Orleans.

• The Shining (1980, USA).

The Overlook Hotel is probably the real star of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece. It works as a brilliant metaphor for the many institutions affirming themselves through geographic and social isolation.

The hotel appears as having a malevolent, collective memory of past violence (the river of blood sequence) and elite corruption (the ghostly ballroom party, a forerunner of Eyes Wide Shut’s location). The isolation amplifies Jack Torrance’s pre-existing rage, masterfully captured by Jack Nicholson’s performance, compelling him to continue the cycle of systemic violence against his family.

Neither a priest nor a public official, Torrance exerts abusive power over Wendy and Danny and the hotel operates as a closed self-sufficient, world protecting, preserving, reproducing, and even compelling Jack’s abuse of his family.

Kubrick’s brilliant use of the garden’s maze, the scaled model of the maze in the hotel’s lobby, and the very maze-like design of the hotel’s architecture, convey the message of a place, a setting, able to nullify its inhabitants, turning them into pieces of an ever-repeating cycle of violence.

The Playgirl magazine browsed by Jack as he waits at the lobby, with its feature devoted to incest, and the hints at sexual abuse in Danny’s wardrobe and toys show, without ever telling the whole story, forcing the audience to connect the dots hinting at abuse as a coded practice.

Agnes of God (1985, USA).

This film, adapted from a stage play, revolves around a court-appointed psychiatrist who must determine the sanity of a young nun, Sister Agnes (Meg Tilly), accused of having killed her newborn baby. The story is a dramatic confrontation between Martha Livingstone (Jane Fonda), the psychiatrist, trying to figure out what happened, and Sister Miriam (Anne Brancroft), the convent’s superior, trying to conceal what happened even if she is unaware of what really happened.

Agnes of God offers a glimpse into how religious institutions and the individuals leading them do their best to keep secrets, whether institutional or personal, and how far they are willing to go as to keep such secrets.

It also provides a metaphor of how religious leaders would rather go into miracle territory before ever admitting their own mistakes, limitations, or the fact that they actively avoid full disclosure of key fundamental facts to understand an issue.

One of the film’s successes is how it discloses, ever so slowly, the existence of secrets. A secret passage connecting the henhouse with the convent’s main building, but also how, the audience becomes aware of Agnes’s condition as a survivor of abuse at the hands of her mother, who is also Sister Miriam’s sister, revealing the even more complex relationship between Agnes and Miriam.

• Eyes Wide Shut (1999, USA)

Kubrick’s final film depicts a doctor who carelessly infiltrates a secret, ritualistic orgy of the wealthy elite. The narrative showcases the ability of wealthy individuals enjoying extreme social isolation and immunity.

On the surface the plot deals with issues ranging from infidelity to boring familial relationships and down to drug consumption probably for the purposes of abuse or what nowadays would be called toxic displays of masculinity.

However, it is also possible to focus on the glimpses if offers at how elites indulge in abuse, knowing their wealth shields them from any accountability.

Kubrick’s film serves as the ultimate cinematic exploration of secrecy as elite immunity, and he is able to do so in ways his own Lolita (1962, USA) was unable to achieve, as he was forced to convey the key issue over layers of symbols, turning Vladimir Nabokov’s novel into a farce.

When the doctor threatens to come forward, he is chillingly silenced by an acquaintance that some institutions are “too big” to be exposed, but also by his own experience identifying the corpse of the model he saved before from an overdose, and when he realizes that his friend, the pianist who brought him into the orgy had “disappeared.”

* * *

Of course, there are many other films and series dealing with abuse; so many that it would be impossible to even mention them all. Brilliant pieces of film-making such as Män som hatar kvinnor (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Sweden, 2009), Il portiere di notte (The Night Porter Italy, 1974), or El castillo de la pureza (The Castle of Purity Mexico, 1972), even comedies were abuse is not obvious at first glance but it is there for whoever is willing to dig it in the plot, such as Almodóvar’s 1988 Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.

These are only a handful of the movies offering intuitions about what lies behind sexual abuse, clergy or otherwise, of minors or adults; females or males.

The fact that countries with systems of law, Church-State models of relationships and cultures so different, are affected by these practices, and the fact that abuse is not limited to religious settings should be a warning. There is no easy solution to abuse as such, otherwise it would not be as pervasive as it is.

It is hard to imagine any of these movies bringing joy or happiness, but all of them can help to develop a better understanding of the world and what makes abuse possible.

A summary of this piece is available as audio after this paragraph.

Final note: The main illustration includes low resolution thumbnails of the posters to promote the movies under consideration. The audio summary of the piece uses Public Domain music: J.S. Bach's Air On The G String (from Orchestral Suite No. 3, BWV 1068), recorded by the United States Air Force Band.