The Nun II

Nuns Upon
A Time

The Nun II
Directed by Michael Chaves
UK/USA Warner Bros
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Some spoilerish territory covered.

I liked The Nun (reviewed here) and thought critics were way too harsh about that movie. It played like a horror romp rather than an unsettling or creepy movie... I think at the time I compared to it a late 1960s/early 1970s Hammer horror movie but with added jump scares and, yeah, I found it to be a lot of fun. So, I was looking forward to The Nun II until I heard a review by one of the more likeable UK critics on a podcast and... he kind of slated it. So, ultimately, I was going in with low expectations.

So I was pleased that, once again, I really liked this sequel and would love to see more from this set of characters. And, being as it’s part of The Conjuring Universe, I think there could well be chance of that happening at some point. Although, in terms of surprises, that’s also a double edged sword... yeah, I’ll get to that in a minute.

Set four years after the events in the first Nun film, in the 1950s, his one deals with the two human survivors from the first one... Sister Irene (played again by Taissa Farmiga, real life younger sister of Vera Farmiga, who plays Lorraine Warren in the main strand of Conjuring films)... and Jonas Bloquet returns as Maurice, who has ‘the nun’ inside him still as a demonic possession (not a spoiler if you remember some of the opening scenes in the first Conjuring movie). And then, of course, there’s Bonnie Aarons as the demonic nun herself, reprising her role from The Conjuring 2 - the Devil Made Me Do it (reviewed here), Annabelle: Creation (reviewed by me here) and, of course, The Nun.

This one see Sister Irene sent on a mission by the church who are trying to track the nun as she starts killing people off in certain countries and Irene, along with her new sidekick Sister Debra (payed by Storm Reid), has to figure out how to catch up with ‘the nun’ until they finally twig that Maurice is taking odd jobs at certain places where gruesome, demonic deaths are now occurring... not that Maurice is even aware he’s brought ‘the nun’ with him, of course.

Okay, so here’s the thing. I can understand why certain critics got bored with The Nun II because it has a very steady pacing of nundemonium set pieces with very little pause between each new set of scares. And it is still very much a ‘jump scare’ kind of movie, for sure. And, it’s not subtle... the demon goes straight for the throat each time, so to speak, wasting no time in killing off ‘persons of interest’ to it in no uncertain terms. Which, actually, in a way I found quite refreshing. There aren’t that many ‘you got a fright and I’m coming back to do that again to you later’ scenes... well, okay there are but there are a lot of ‘nun goes kill crazy and finish her enemies off quick’ scenes intermingled with them so, you really don’t know which, if any, of the characters is going to be picked on for a solid kill from one scene to the next. Although it does keep key characters alive for this one.

And, midst all the ‘camera keeping the audience focused on dead areas of the screen so it can frighten them from somewhere else’ mentality of the movie, which to be fair is standard for modern horror movies, there are also some nice ideas in here such as the demon nun casting her image in things. Two notable examples of this are... firstly, when she manifests as a dirty patch in some wallpaper. Despite grumbling critics, it doesn’t go on forever and, if anything, it maybe is a nice shout back to the original 1963 version of The Haunting (reviewed here) in terms of ‘haunted wallpaper’ but, let’s face it, it’s never going to be as unsettling as that highlight moment of the Robert Wise movie.

Secondly, there’s an absolutely amazing sequence when Irene finds herself in a back alley confronted by a big magazine stand rack. The pages on all the magazines keep turning in unison (at least fifty of them, I reckon) showing disturbing faces until finally, when all the pages come to rest, they make up a big image of the demonic nun. Now, admittedly, the scene then goes on to an attempt to misdirect the audience really poorly and obviously to get the jump scare but, that’s okay because, even though I could figure out exactly where the scare would be coming from and when, I still jumped at it so, yeah, it’s well done.

The one downside to the movie is that, if you remember the scene in the original Conjuring movie, you’ll know a specific character definitely can’t be killed off in this one... so it means there’s less surprise by the point when, without that baggage, you would expect them to die. So, yeah, a bit of a shame but, continuity should always win with this kind of thing, for sure. Incidentally, fans of that first movie may want to stick around for a mid-post credits scene in this one which features a nice cameo appearance.

All said and done, however, the film does what the first one did and throws a lot of demonic mayhem at the audience, literally including a few scenes with a terrifying goat demon representation of the devil chasing... well, galloping loudly... after everyone. And it’s a really good bit of creature design, I would say. It put me in mind of one of the demons manifested in the wonderful Hammer film The Devil Rides Out (review coming soonish) and one wonders how good a modern day adapation of that particular book would be.  

And on hand, through it all, we have Marco Beltrami’s excellent score helping lift the ‘action horror’ element and contributing to, what for me is, a pretty fun time at the cinema. So, yeah, don’t use this as a jump on movie, for sure but, my verdict on The Nun II would be... a worthy successor to the first movie and one I would recommend to horror fans especially. I had a great time with this one and will hopefully be picking up the Blu Ray when it hits the retail shelves, for sure.