‘The Nun’ doesn’t have a prayer
The one cardinal sin a horror movie with a demon nun can commit? Not having enough demon nun.
A spinoff of James Wan’s popular “The Conjuring” horror franchise, “The Nun” ( ★★☆☆; rated R) finally unleashes its promise of unholy hell in an action-packed climax. But most of the film is a disappointingly dull and arduous journey until then, a mix of slowburn religious mystery and old-school adventure that egregiously fails to use its greatest hit: Bonnie Aarons’ terrifyingly freaky villainess of the cloth.
Her frightful figure first appeared in “The Conjuring 2,” and “The Nun” acts as a prequel set decades before she haunted supernatural expert Lorraine Warren (Vera Farmiga). In 1952, an incident involving a nun hanging herself at a secluded abbey in Romania comes on the radar of the Catholic Church. Father Burke (Demian Bichir) is summoned to Vatican City and sent off to investigate with young novitiate Sister Irene (Vera’s sister Taissa Farmiga).
They meet Frenchie (Jonas Bloquet), the local lothario who found the crow-eaten body of the suicidal nun. Once inside the abbey, Burke and Irene begin to learn the dark secrets within, find a door with “God Ends Here” scrawled on it, run into distrusting nuns and, eventually, tussle with Valak, a sinister shapeshifter who lives up to the name “The Defiler.”
Much of “The Nun” comprises haphazard episodes stitched together in order to make it to the finale. Director Corin Hardy proves to have a knack for using light and shadow efficiently for the occasional jump scare, although Valak only fitfully shows her ghastly face until almost the end of the movie. It’s a real shame because Aarons is a heart-stopping sort, whether she’s looming down a dark hall or evilly shrieking.
There are a couple of solid twists and a pretty neat connection that ties “The Nun” to the first “Conjuring,” although the new film primarily stands alone, even if it doesn’t come close to the height of this franchise’s fear factor. “Nun” lacks the constant sense of dread and unsettling doom of films such as “The Exorcist” or even “The Last Exorcism,” though there’s one notable scene of “perpetual adoration” – the marathon prayer the abbey’s nuns maintain to keep Valak at bay – that’s visceral and torturous for poor Sister Irene. But compared with the chills of “Hereditary,” “The Nun” doesn’t have a prayer of measuring up.
A pulp-fiction feel and Farmiga’s righteous performance make up for the lack of terror, to a degree. But whiffing on giving Aarons enough scream time to scare us back to Sunday school is nun-sense not easily forgiven.