The Nun

Nundemonium

The Nun
2018 USA Directed by Corin Hardy
UK cinema release print.

As a fan of The Conjuring universe (with the possible exception of the first Annabelle movie (reviewed here), I’d been looking forward to The Nun and was especially ramped up for it after her cameo appearances in Annabelle: Creation (reviewed here). However, when it hit UK cinemas on Thursday, my twitter timeline was full of people who had watched it during the day (one of them even a professional film critic) saying how dull and unscary it was. So I went from a ‘looking forward’ high to really lowering my expectations to a kind of ‘can’t be worse than Mortdecai’ kind of attitude.

I needn’t have worried. Although it has some minor problems or, at the very least, unusual pacing decisions, The Nun is actually quite a solid, scary movie and it sits well within that good old ‘comfort horror’ zone I sometimes like to reside in when I go to some of these things.

Set in the 1950s, this is the spin-off tale of the demonically possessed nun who gave Ed and Lorraine Warren (played by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) so much trouble in the The Conjuring 2 (aka The Conjuring 2 - The Enfield Case reviewed here) and also some trouble seen in the first film which we didn’t realise until the nice reveal at the end of this one, it turns out. This tells the story of Father Burke (played by Demián Bichir) who is summoned to the Vatican and assigned, by some high up officials which includes a brief appearance by Michael Smiley, to go to Romania to investigate the suicide of a nun at an Abbey there to determine whether the place is still holy. Father Burke is an expert on matters of exorcism and so forth and he knows right from the bat that he is being asked to do more than this and that his bosses know more than they are letting on about what’s going on over there. This becomes especially apparent when he is told to go there via England to pick up a young ‘nun to be’ called Sister Irene (played here by Taissa Farmiga) who has not taken her vows yet. When they spend some time together he realises he has been asked to use her to assist him because of a bunch of visions she had as a child. They go to Romania and do as instructed, seeking out a farmer called Frenchie (played by Jonas Bloquet) who they are told to go and see because it was he who found the nun hanging outside the Abbey.

The audience already knows just why she was hanging there, as it happens, because the film's opening sequence takes you straight into full on horror movie territory and starts piling on the scares from the start. When the three of them go to the Abbey, they are given an indifferent welcome and Burke and Irene are given quarters to tide them over to the next morning as the nuns can’t talk to them before then. Meanwhile, Frenchie goes back to find the horse and cart he drove the two up in and... then the horror starts up again.

Truth be told there’s not a heck of a lot of plot on this thing but basically, the rest of the film is how the three characters take on occult forces and a bunch of nuns being controlled by a demonic entity and... there’s not much pause between each horror set piece, truth be told. Actually, this film really shouldn’t work to the extent that it does because there are no real pauses midst all the storm and fury but... well... I have to admit I found it both scary (purely in terms of cheaply done but phenomenally well executed jump scares... there’s no real lurking sense of dread here) and enormously fun. Somehow the director manages to pull all of these horror set pieces together and runs us from scare to scare at a breakneck pace which is usually a recipe for disaster but somehow, at least for me, works a treat. If anything, in terms of plot and subtlety, it reminded me of one of those early to mid 1970s Hammer movies which were their last hurrah before their inevitable demise towards the end of that decade... just with a slightly more breakneck pacing.

I’ve read a few criticisms that the characters are not very well fleshed out but I’d disagree on that point. Admittedly they’re only character sketches but I certainly found their various back stories and on screen chemistry something which absolutely had me on their side from the first. These three work well as a single unit and they even have time for some humour midst all the gothic grotesquerie on show here. I think the producers really learned from the fact that the main movies in The Conjuring franchise were populated with very likeable characters and so this made the horror element even more threatening. Well, we have that kind of camaraderie here and they even have a lead actress who looks somewhat like Vera Farmiga does in those movies. No surprise there, actually, because it turns out that Taissa Farmiga, who plays the main protagonist pretty much, is actually Vera’s younger sister. So that’s kind of cool. I think these characters were roughed out well enough and I certainly believed in them, for sure.

The one thing which annoyed me a little was the fact that these three characters, more than any others in a lot of modern horror movies, made the classic genre mistake of constantly splitting up and having their own scary adventures away from the others. This is just plain ridiculous... once you know you are being trolled by at least one fearsome supernatural entity (and there’s a lot more than just one in this movie) then it’s common sense that you all stay within arms reach of each other. In some ways these characters are just asking to get in trouble with the various, habit wearing manifestations of demonic evil that they keep running across and I really had to wonder what the writers were thinking at a few points in the narrative.

That being said, though, it was small price to pay for premature burials, zombie nuns, shocking mirror manifestations and going toe to toe with underwater nun monsters. Not to mention a completely non-surprising but still quite cool way of deploying some of Christ’s blood which I was really into (it was a really obvious moment but I’m glad the did it here). And all this is nicely scored by Abel Korzeniowski, who did such a good job with the scores to the three seasons of Penny Dreadful. Admittedly there’s nothing groundbreaking here, with the usual sound design versus atonal undercurrent dominating to an extent but, it is all very appropriately scored and I’m looking forward to spinning this score away from the movie at some point (since the powers that be were on the ball for once and issued a soundtrack CD of this one).

So there you go. The Nun is not a classically great horror film like The Conjuring (reviewed here) but it is a heck of a lot of fun and for scares it also walks over a lot of the competition this year. Definitely would watch this one again on Blu Ray and really had a good time with it. Certainly something I’d say to go to if the horror genre is your kind of thing. And, like I said, the ending of the movie, when you would expect the credits to roll, has a really nice tie in to the first film in the franchise which will probably be appreciated by people who admired that one. Glad I didn’t miss out on this.