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. 

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.