The Nun (2018) – Review

Creating a cinematic universe is not easy — just ask the people over at Warner Bros with their DC Extended Universe — but producer James Wan seems to have struck gold with the ever-growing collection of horror movies that have spun off of the success of his 2013 horror film The Conjuring. Though to be fair, not all of the movies in The Conjuring Universe have been received well: the 2014 spinoff Annabelle being a particularly dreadful entry, but as horror films don’t usually have budgets running into the hundreds of millions, a clunker or two is easier to brush off. Thus, films like 2018’s The Nun, making almost $400 million worldwide on a $22 million dollar budget, ensures that this particular franchise is not going anywhere anytime soon.

Director Corin Hardy’s The Nun is the seventh installment in The Conjuring Universe, and its existence stems solely from the popularity of the “demonic nun” who had popped up to harass poor Vera Farminga’s plucky demonologist in The Conjuring 2 — which later popped up again in the prequel spin-off Annabelle: Creation, where it terrorized a bunch of little girls — but now, with The Nun, writers James Wan and Gary Dauberman give us the “full” backstory to the demon known as Valak. This movie takes us back to 1952, where we see a couple of Roman Catholic nuns cautiously heading down a spooky corridor of their crumbling abbey, one that seems to include its own fog machine, and not to put it too lightly, but things don’t go well for these nuns, as dark forces drag one of them away while the second is forced to commit suicide to prevent the demonic spirit from possessing her.

Theological Question: Exactly how powerful does a demon have to be to casually murder or possess a passel of Catholic nuns? You’d think being a “Bride of Christ” would at least give you some kind of protection from evil.

The Vatican goes into full-on damage control mode, sending Father Burke (Demián Bichir) and Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga) to investigate the incident, but the strange thing here is that though Father Burke is the Vatican’s go-to guy for verifying miracles, and he even has a history of performing such exorcisms before, poor Sister Irene is only a novitiate, not even having taken her vows yet. So why in the world would the Vatican send such an odd couple on such a nasty mystery?  Now, we do later learn that Sister Irene entered the order because of visions, ones that have plagued her over the years, but how the Vatican knew that these particular visions were crucial to solving the mystery of a nun’s suicide is never made clear.  Then, when shit hits the proverbial demonic fan (for which Father Burke doesn’t even think to call for reinforcements), I really started to doubt the Vatican’s assessment of the whole situation. At one point, Father Burke is lured out to the abbey’s graveyard by the vision of a young boy, who in flashbacks we learned died during a failed exorcism, and the priest soon finds himself buried alive in one of the graves. Yet the characters in this film blow off these horrific encounters as if they are standard expected job-related problems.

At this point, I’d be rethinking my career choices.

There really isn’t much of a plot to The Nun, with endless shots of people wandering down dark corridors taking up the bulk of the film’s ninety-three-minute run-time, and the mystery itself is fairly generic. We find out that the Abbey was once used by a duke who was obsessed with the occult, and for some reason tried to summon forth a demon, but before accomplishing this he was killed by a group of Christian knights, who sealed the rift with an artifact containing the blood of Jesus Christ.

Will this holy reliquary come into play to save the day? Can Sister Irene’s visions uncover its location? Is Father Burke the most useless character to ever appear in a horror movie? All these questions and more are answered as The Nun attempts to tie everything neatly into The Conjuring Universe, as if it were some supernatural ouroboros, while actually giving us no real new information at all.

  We already knew nuns were scary.

This is not to say that there aren’t sufficiently scary moments in this film — though director Corin Hardy does lose points for being a little excessive with his jump scares — as the moody atmosphere of the haunted abbey never seems to let up, and as a viewer the feeling of dread and hopelessness is quite pervasive, but you will also at times find yourself shouting at the screen, “What the hell are you people still doing there?” as Father Burke and Sister Irene (who are at times aided by a Canadian expatriate named Frenchie [Jonas Bloquet]) are constantly separated to wander off on their own, for no fucking reason! Our three leads continually act in ways no sane person would ever imagine. A locked door mysteriously opens, and their response is basically, “I guess I should investigate and follow that shadowy figure.” Father Burke seems unconcerned with sending a young novitiate off on her own when every fibre of your being should be screaming “Let’s get the hell out of here,” and it’s this kind of attitude that permeates the entire film.

Who could guess that following a nun, one who is dragging the rope she hung herself by, could end badly?

Of course, characters acting against their own best interests is certainly nothing new to the horror genre; the Amityville Horror franchise practically runs on this sentiment, but people doing dumb things is not The Nun’s major failing, it’s the fact that there really isn’t much originality to be found during its short run-time. There are character moments lifted straight from The Exorcist movies, we get visual cues that hearken back to Tod Brownings Dracula, and even the eventual “defeat” of the demon is a blatant rip-off from the climax of Tales of the Crypt: Demon Knight. For younger viewers, this will obviously not be an issue, but horror fans could find themselves ticking off a checklist of references instead of being pulled into the movie.

“On second thought, let’s not go to the abbey. ‘Tis a silly place.”

It’s clear that director Corin Hardy is more than capable of assembling all the right ingredients to make a good horror movie — even if some of those ingredients are borrowed from someone else’s kitchen — and The Nun is overall an okay installment in this ever-growing horror franchise, but it will also sit on the shelf as a lesser chapter when compared to some of its predecessors.