I know the name Cabrini from the 1980s horror film Candyman, the Chicago housing project Cabrini-Green being the site of that film's fantastical and otherworldly killings.

So I was expecting a vastly different film to this epic biography of the Italian nun Francesca Cabrini who became the first canonised American saint.

Cabrini is still a horror film, but a horror film of a different kind, one where the filmmakers accurately depict the sub-human conditions the US allowed its immigrant population to live in, and the vile way women are thought of, spoken about and spoken to.

It takes place in the New York of 1889, but so much of this film could be transposed to a modern-day setting.

Francesca Cabrini founded a charity that still exists, its roots and its social good having its foundations in the immigrant communities of New York.

Cabrini is made by the same team that produced Sound of Freedom, the 2023 production that put its religious faith front and centre tackling sex child trafficking, and racking up an impressive $250 million at the box office.

Some of that money has found its way into the production of this film, because it is a spectacular work of art, achingly beautiful at times.

Actually, God doesn't get much of a mention in the film, which is refreshing in a film about a nun.

The screenwriters, Rod Barr and Alejandro Monteverde, focus on the factious pitching sessions this determined woman endures with the men in power as she attempts to address the injustices she sees, like an 1889 episode of Shark Tank.

Having already founded a small charity, nun Cabrini (Cristiana Dell'Anna) demands an audience with Pope Leo VIII to tell him of her calling to establish a mission in China, but with a box full of recent pleas from immigrant Catholics to the US, the Pope tells her she has the Papal blessing as long as she starts her work in New York.

Cabrini and a small group of sisters arrive into Five Points, one of Manhattan's most squalid neighbourhoods.

They benefit from a kindly act by prostitute Vittoria (Romana Maggiora Vergano), who allows them to sleep in her room for the night.

The film's first half is on these Five Points streets - and under them in the sewers where many immigrant children were forced to live until the nuns founded their first orphanage.

On these streets Cabrini and her team meet unmasked hatred, racism and misogyny, but in the film's second half they meet these acts dressed up in suits as they begin to tackle bigger social issues.

The nuns' initial success in founding orphanages among the city's well-to-do neighbourhoods presents challenges for the city's mayor (John Lithgow) and for its archbishop (David Morse), who finds them an enormous property far away from town (just north of what is today Hudson Heights).

Her orphans safe, Cabrini turns to the city's other issues, particularly the disparity in health care between "Americans" and Italian, Jewish, Polish and Irish immigrants, which only ticked Chicago's founding fathers off even more.

She was a tenacious woman, Cabrini, and Dell'Anna captures both the tenacity and the frailty of the woman's secular body slowly succumbing to tuberculosis.

The writing is often grandiose, lots of speech-making, lots of pomposity from the male characters, not much nuance to any of them barring Cabrini and her archbishop.

The production design team doesn't spare any expense on the work that reproduces century-before-last New York.There is magnificent camera work employing exquisite framing from cinematographer Gorka Gomez Andreu.

The film's candle budget must have been substantial, and the candles' subtle glow is mesmerising in many scenes.

It is an impressive film, a rich old-school historical work commandingly directed by Alejandro Monteverde, who can be forgiven for genuflecting a little too much to Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini.