The two Dons, father and son, are stereotypes of Latin lovers, but the way the poor and ill are depicted is the worst — simply abominable. Not that there are not sinners in the lower classes, but there’s not a redeemable one of them in the bunch. Even other "shock" films, like Tod Brownings Freaks (an obvious influence) or Werner Herzog’s later Even Dwarfs Started Small (Auch Zwerge Haben Klein Angefangen), have positive characters amongst their criminal and murderous lots.

As for the lead character? Yes, Pinal is an attractive woman, with great legs, and a hefty bosom that Rey lays his face upon when he undoes her blouse and thinks of raping her. But her character is so detached from life (she lives out masochistic crown of thorns fantasies) and the film that one would not care if she was raped, by either her uncle or the indigents. She is a failure at life, love, and any career, so when she goes to Jorge at film’s end, she is accepting her role as a servile failure. But she would be one regardless of the film’s end, for were she to go groveling back to the nunnery her end would be even more ignominious.

An even more bizarre character is Ramona, who seems to have a thing for both Dons, even though the elder one has a pedophilic fetish for her young, rope-jumping daughter. Yet she has no problem helping him drug and possibly rape Viridiana, nor lie for him. Again, were this film more parodic, it might work, but since the film is played rather straight, it makes her a monstrous, if not outright psychotic, character with no real grounding in motive.

The Criterion Collection DVD of the film is rather skimpy on extras; there's not even an audio commentary. The transfer of the film is not a good one, with several scenes where obvious scratches and damage has occurred. It is also a bit muddy, and the white subtitles are often lost in glaring whites. If a film is not even going to be dubbed, the least that can be done is to put the subtitles in color, especially on black and white films. There are brief and rather pointless interviews with lead actress Pinal and Spanish cultural critic Richard Porton, excerpts from a 1964 French TV series called Cinéastes De Notre Temps (Cineastes Of Our Times) on Buñuel, and a thirty-page insert with an essay by film critic Michael Wood, which incidentally ends with a perfect example of the criticism of intent:

But the blasphemy is not against Christ and the Father. It is against the belief in progress- or at least the conventional sense of it - whether in the form of Jorge’s plans for improving the estate or of Viridiana’s project for improving the beggars’ lives. The beggars are not evil or the dark side of virtue. They are the unruliness of life itself, a reminder that pleasure and curiosity and appetite can always turn to destruction and violence. This is not an argument against pleasure and curiosity and appetite, or an appeal for law and order. It is a picture of a society that doesn’t understand its own needs. Buñuel’s skepticism and his sense of outrage concern the smallness of our vision of progress, our narrow attempts to achieve it through rational or moralistic planning, and our anxious disregard of the disruptive forces without which no society would be human.

Note the last melodramatic proclamation. Of course, this is all what Wood believes the film intends, not what is actually onscreen, for to be so compellingly intellectually bold, as described, the film would have to be much better than the end result. What is actually on screen is a pallid imitation of religious criticism, poorly put together in a helter-skelter fashion. There is also an interview excerpt from the book Objects Of Desire: Conversations With Luis Buñuel. There is also the original theatrical trailer, larded with hyperbolic critical praise, but the film contains no orgy scene, which the trailer boasts it does, and which it claims outdoes the orgy scene from Federico Fellini’s infinitely superior film, La Dolce Vita.