Movies You May Have Missed: The Nun

The Nun Review

Halloween is just a handful of days away, so y’all know what that means! LAST MINUTE HORROR MOVIE BINGEATHONS! 

Grab some fun-sized candy from your plastic cauldron (#sorrynotsorry trick-or-treaters), your besties, some apple cider (or a pumpkin spice latte if YA BASIC), turn down the lights and get ready for some ghoulishly fun and freaky flicks, starting with 2018’s The Nun. 

The 5th film in The Conjuring franchise The Nun snaps into spooky action with Sister Victoria (Charlotte Hope, The Spanish Princess) hurtling herself out of her Romanian convent’s high window, a noose roped ‘round her neck. It’s 1952 in this Conjuring prequel and the gruesome suicide of the young nun raises red flags in Rome. 

The religious leaders in the Vatican waste no time in assembling a two-person task force and dispatching them to investigate the convent: Father Burke (Demian Bichir, Alien: Covenant), a priest experienced in the art of exorcisms and the supernatural, and Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga, American Horror Story), a young doe-eyed novitiate on the cusp of taking her vows. With Sister Irene’s history of frequent godly (or are they ungodly?!) visions and Father Burke’s demonology know-how, the odds are definitely in the duo’s favor. 

 The atmospheric location-- complete with a forsaken cemetery, and clusters of crosses poking out of its inner courtyard-- is loaded with the kind of goosebump-raising early chills that made the first Conjuring film so irresistible. The castle-like convent, perched above the heavily wooded, and isolated, forests of Romania is at once disarmingly gorgeous, and deeply ominous. Fog creeps in at sundown, bells tinkle on tombstones, and shadows begin to flit from corners of the convent rooms to the crumbly rock walls. 

  

With the spotlight on The Conjuring 2’s deranged demon nun Valak (Bonnie Aarons, done up in phenomenally haunting makeup) known for prowling around tormenting Lorraine Warren (Vera Farmiga), The Nun had the potential to be one of the most hair-raising Conjuring universe movies. Instead, it’s..well..ok. Yes, The Nun is sewn into the fabric of paranormal investigating power couple Ed and Lorraine Warren’s supernatural saga but it doesn’t feel up to the same caliber of The Conjuring 2 or Annabelle Creation or... well... necessary. 

Hardy and the filmmaking team get props for trying. Which is a lot more than can be said for some other recent Conjuring universe flicks lately. *cough* La Llorona *cough* Annabelle Comes Home *cough* Can someone get this girl a soothing honey cough drop?! Unlike them, The Nun isn’t a shameless cash grab or half-hearted attempt to ride on the coattails of the franchise. Hardy and his filmmakers understand what makes a horror movie tick and there’s no question that they love the genre and loved making this movie. Take for example an especially eerie mirror sequence (watch that movie, you can't miss it) and the emphasis on practical effects. The filmmakers try to make an original fright fest but don’t quite have the punch of energy and complexity of a script to do so.           

The lame-o script wastes the talent of AHS regular Taissa Farmiga, and the visual storytelling resorts to been-there-done-that tropes like when the camera pans across pitch-black hallways only to sweep back to whichever pale-faced panting character have the misfortune of standing there...annnnd there’s an undead creep behind/next to/above them. Cue the McHorror Jump Scares™!!  Add to that cult activity, black magic rituals, deranged demon loving aristocrats, and a quaint rural village that masks a horrendous secret and The Nun is uncannily familiar. We’ve seen all this before. 

Despite what an atmospheric slamdunk the movie is, The Nun falters under its limited and underdeveloped cast. There are only three main characters--  Priestdaddy Burke, Sister Irene, and their French-Canadian guide, Frenchie (no relation to Grease’s beauty school dropout or the yellow mustard empire).

Frenchie (Jonas Bloquet, Savage) and co.'s character development is communion-wafer thin. The trio bumbles along, tiptoeing through the creepy convent in the dead of night because day time exploration is so passé. Pale-faced, raggedly breathing and clutching creaky iron lanterns they make a series of decisions only a lobotomized patient would be capable of. Beginning with us realizing five seconds into them arriving at the black castle that it’s HAUNTED AS FUCK, while it takes them until nightfall to realize the Convent is a dark dark place. Even after the obviously DEAD abbess veiled in black, planted in a pitch dark cobwebby room rasps ominous warnings to Father Too Stupid To Live, they still don't catch on from the get-go. Oi vey.

Add to that how amid Valak wreaking havoc and destruction on the convent, Priestdaddy Burke leaves a defenseless Sister Irene to fend off The Defiler! The Profane!The Marquis of Snakes!

The 👏  demon 👏 with 👏  almost 👏 more👏  names👏  than👏 Daenerys Targaryen on her own, because he’s too busy playing hide and seek with Daniel (August Maturo, Girl Meets World), the young boy he tried to free from the hold of a demon, and who died after a particularly violent exorcism years earlier. Daniel, a textbook case of The Creepy Child™, runs around pranking Father Burke by spewing our live, writhing, snakes and trying to oh, murder him.

UM WHUT.

Here’s the thing. The Nun had promise! But, along the way, it degraded into absurdity. With its excessive reliance on slow camera pans, jump scares, and disturbing dreams, The Nun has all the gimmicky horror movie tropes down and is disappointingly derivative of other evil nun stories. For all its attempts at originality, The Nun is yet another disposable horror B-movie with genuine scares that are little to nun.