Lukewarm Nun will leave you in the cold
Flick takes us back to the beginning — before writers conjured anything up
With its many jump-scares, decor inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, and more neck-cracking noises that an overbooked chiropractor’s office, The Nun clearly wants to be Our Lady of Perpetual Terror. But if you demand narrative logic and believable characters in your horror movie, here’s a clue as to how it scores on a scale of none to 10; it ain’t called The Ten.
Loosely spun off from the wildly successful Conjuring series — two Conjurings and two Annabelles to date, with at least three more planned — The Nun is also the first film chronologically, taking place in Romania in 1952.
The setting is the Abbey of Saint Carta, an actual monastery, although the real-life version has been abandoned since the 1600s.
After one of the nuns commits suicide, officials at the Vatican send someone to investigate. They choose Father Burke, played by Mexican actor Demián Bichir, whose fortunes have come down a bit since his Oscar-nominated turn in 2011’s A Better Life. Catholicism being a famously equal-opportunity institution, he’s paired with Sister Irene, a novitiate played by Taissa Farmiga, younger sister of The Conjuring ’s Vera.
The two arrive in rural Romania and strike up an uneasy friendship with “Frenchie,” a French-Canadian expat played with a bizarre twinkle in his eye by Belgian actor Jonas Bloquet.
He’s easily the funniest thing in The Nun, although whether by intention or accident it’s hard to say.
At the Abbey, Burke and Irene discover a strange key without a lock, squeaky doors, a haunted radio, bells that ring themselves, and some really dreary interior design; nothing that WD -40, a few 60-watt bulbs and maybe some holy water couldn’t fix. They also meet Sister Oana (Ingrid Bisu, a bona fide Romanian), who helpfully provides a rambling backstory about a gate to Hell that was blocked for centuries until bombings during the Second World War opened a crack.
The screenplay is from Conjuring stalwarts James Wan and Gary Dauberman (Corin Hardy joins the crew to direct), and provides just enough detail to set up scenes where the priest or the nun-in-training will be alone long enough to have some creepy demon jump out at them. Nick-of-time rescues included one inventive effort that was half exorcism, half defibrillation.
But there’s not enough plot to keep a viewer interested, even though the film scampers past in a brief 96 minutes. To borrow a term from Catholic dogma, I have to confess it left me cold.