THE NUN (2018)

Studio:      New Line Cinema
Director:    Corin Hardy
Writer:      Gary Dauberman
Producer:  Peter Safran, James Wan
Stars:     Demian Bichir, Taissa Farmiga, Jonas Bloquet, Charlotte Hope, Ingrid Bisu, Bonnie Aarons

Review Score:

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Summary:

An inexperienced young nun partners with a hardened priest to investigate an evil presence haunting a Romanian abbey.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

1952 – Abbey of St. Carta, Romania – After watching the demon Valak murder another nun while they searched the castle’s catacombs for a holy relic, Sister Victoria commits suicide to avoid becoming possessed. Maurice ‘Frenchie’ Theriault, a local farmer who makes deliveries to the convent, later finds Victoria’s body hanging from a noose outside.

Vatican City – Cardinal Conroy and Bishop Pasquale task Father Anthony Burke with investigating the reportedly cursed abbey.

London, England – While entertaining children at St. Vincent’s Hospital, aspiring postulant Irene learns that she has also been assigned to investigate the abbey. Upon meeting Father Burke, Irene openly wonders why she was selected for the assignment.

Biertan, Romania – Burke and Irene meet with Frenchie, who escorts the duo to the abbey. Frenchie shows them Sister Victoria’s body, which Burke finds clutching a key. Burke and Irene also note that fresh blood is pooled on the steps beneath where Victoria hung, even though she died weeks earlier.

Burke and Irene have a cryptic encounter with The Abbess, who disguises her face with a black veil. Burke and Irene learn they will have to stay in the convent overnight in order to interview the nuns after their daily vow of silence concludes.

After leaving the abbey, Frenchie has a frightening encounter with Sister Victoria’s ghost in the property’s cemetery.

Over dinner, Irene tells Father Burke that Bishop Form helped her as a child because she experienced strange visions that always ended with the phrase, “Mary points the way.” Burke tells Irene about a boy named Daniel who died while Burke performed an exorcism on him.

During the night, Daniel’s ghost leads Burke to the graveyard outside. A snake emerges from Daniel’s mouth. The snake causes Burke to fall into an open grave. Burke becomes buried alive.

Woken by her own haunting visions, Irene has an encounter with Valak in the abbey’s chapel. Following the sound of a ringing bell, Irene goes outside to dig out Father Burke. The two of them retrieve several occult tomes from Burke’s coffin.

The next morning, Burke and Irene find more blood on the abbey’s front steps. Burke reads about the demon Valak in one of the recovered books while Irene sets off to discover more about Sister Victoria’s key.

While drinking at The Black Bear pub, Frenchie learns about a local girl who committed suicide. Bartender Grigore warns that the evil at the abbey is starting to poison their village.

Sister Oana stops Irene from disturbing Sister Ruth while Ruth participates in the convent’s cycle of perpetual prayer. Oana tells Irene about the abbey’s haunted history. Oana explains that the castle was built by an occultist duke during The Dark Ages. Swordsmen working for the Catholic Church used a relic containing the blood of Jesus Christ to prevent the duke from opening a gateway for unspeakable evil. Church authorities turned the castle into a convent, but bombings from the war disturbed the evil once again.

Irene tells Oana about her encounter with Valak. Oana explains that the demon takes the form of a nun so it can hide among their cloister. With the abbey’s gates closed for the evening, Irene is forced to stay overnight once more.

Father Burke has another cryptic conversation with The Abbess. After The Abbess issues a warning, the veiled woman crumbles into a corpse and vanishes.

Woken from a nightmare, Irene recovers from a haunting vision of Sister Victoria to follow Oana’s voice to a door in the basement catacombs. Irene has another terrifying encounter with Valak. Oana rescues Irene from the demon.

Acting on Oana’s instructions, Irene goes to the chapel where she unexpectedly finds Oana’s dead body on the floor. The other nuns assemble with Irene to continue the cycle of perpetual prayer. An unseen presence supernaturally kills several of the nuns while Irene feverishly continues praying. The presence scars Irene’s back with a pentagram.

Father Burke encounters Daniel’s ghost again. Frenchie arrives at the abbey in time to rescue Burke from another ghoul.

Burke and Frenchie find Irene alone. Irene realizes that the chapel is empty and the nuns were merely visions all along.

Oana’s ghost suddenly attacks. Father Burke uses a crucifix, holy water, and prayer to burst the reanimated nun into flames. Frenchie shoots Oana with a gun.

Irene and Burke conclude that Valak desires a human host and, as the last surviving nun at the abbey, Sister Victoria killed herself to prevent possession. Along with Frenchie, Burke and Irene decide to venture into the catacombs to find the holy relic and close the evil gateway. Father Burke administers the vows that officially make Irene a full nun.

Burke, Irene, and Frenchie follow a Mary statue’s pointed finger to a keyhole and retrieve the relic filled with Jesus’ blood. The trio then separates to search for the gateway.

Irene ends up trapped within a bloody pentagram on the floor of the chamber where the duke conducted his occult rituals. Elsewhere, Burke wards off an assault of demonic nuns by burning a cross of fire on the floor.

Frenchie breaks into the duke’s chamber to confront a group of nuns wearing bloody sacks over their heads. Frenchie finds Irene levitating inside the pentagram. Possessed by Valak, Irene attacks Frenchie. Frenchie anoints Irene’s head with blood from the relic hanging around her body, which separates Irene from the demon. Valak chokes out Frenchie and supernaturally throws Irene into a deepening pool of water.

Burke has another encounter with Daniel’s ghost. Another snake emerges from Daniel’s mouth to bite Father Burke in his eye.

Valak begins drowning Irene. Burke’s prayers are ineffective. Irene feigns death so that Valak pulls her out of the water. Having swallowed it while submerged, Irene spits Jesus’ blood into Valak’s face. The gateway opens beneath the water and sucks Valak into its whirlpool.

Frenchie revives Irene after the gateway closes. Frenchie, Irene, and Burke recover and leave the abbey. However, an inverted cross is seen branded into the back of Frenchie’s neck.

20 Years Later – Wakefield, Massachussetts – Demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren deliver a lecture about Frenchie’s subsequent exorcism. Carolyn Perron is in attendance.

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Review:

Love, hate, or indifference for the end result aside, you’ve got to appreciate when a movie tells you what cards it will play before the whole hand is dealt. Following the first of two Ed and Lorraine Warren bookends, “The Nun” opens on a pair of eponymous sisters exploring catacombs beneath a Romanian abbey that may as well be a vampire’s crypt. Countless crosses crowd the corridor. Fog fills the floor. An imposing wooden door on rusty iron hinges bears a warning in Latin, “God ends here.” We haven’t even arrived at the unseen presence pulling one of the women into darkness while she claws at the camera, yet the movie has proudly broadcast precisely what styling lies in store.

Bared back to brass tacks, you could fill an ocean with the classic Universal and Hammer monster movie atmosphere pouring from “The Nun” like a waterfall. That’s excellent news for wanderers eager to tour abundant ambiance formed on a foundation of pitch perfect production design from Jennifer Spence. Attendees anticipating a substantial story behind the spook show’s creepy curtain on the other hand, may wish hotter fictional fire fueled the setup’s smoke.

After the second woman’s subsequent suicide, the Vatican does what the Vatican always does in such cinematic situations. They send in a priest with a haunted past, the only kind of clergyman who exists in fright films, to investigate. Father Burke gets partnered with Irene, a young postulant who has not yet taken her formal nun vows, but whose predictive visions landed her on some bishop’s radar to play idealistic innocent to Burke’s battle-weary veteran.

Burke and Irene’s first stop upon arriving in Dracula’s homeland takes them to Frenchie, a handsome rural farmer who discovered the dead nun. At least 50% of Frenchie’s dialogue involves either flirting with Irene in a manner that was probably less problematic in the 1952 setting, or coughing up weirdly timed one-liners. Frenchie’s side purpose of exchanging eyes with Irene gets abandoned early. His comic relief remains in play as a distraction for the duration however, bizarrely tuned to the tone of a Brendan Frasier “Mummy” movie when absolutely no one else ever exhibits a similarly cavalier spirit.

Together, the trio takes a trip to the abbey to investigate reports of an unspeakable evil. “The Conjuring” franchise fans already know that evil is named Valak. Good for them, because “The Nun” doesn’t desire getting into details to explain anything more about him, her, or it besides identifying Valak as a demon disguised in nun’s vestments for convenient incognito creeping around the convent.

Instead of an origin story for the titular terror, “The Nun” more or less presents a series of scares and scenes that don’t necessarily tie to a distinct narrative. Here’s an example of context being banished to the background. One sequence features Father Burke frightened by the ghost of Daniel, a boy who died years earlier during an exorcism gone wrong. The ghoul spits up a snake. The snake scares the priest. Father Burke stumbles backward into an open grave where he ends up supernaturally buried alive. A brief burp of mid-movie exposition later mentions the snake’s vague connection to Valak. But basically we’re looking at long lines of “pop goes the weasel” dominoes with no real relation to the demon. Daniel recurs often enough to become more of a character than Valak does, even though Daniel ultimately serves as a gag to waylay Father Burke whenever he needs to be somewhere other than alongside Irene.

Yet “The Nun” has so much fun with its frights, your escapist imagination may not immediately fall through empty spaces in its Swiss cheese slice of narrative. Even when the plot of Valak’s escalating antics isn’t accelerating, which can be as often as manufactured reasons to tear the main trio apart, director Corin Hardy applies a focused artistic eye and confident craftsman’s hand to keep the engine of eeriness revving constantly.

“The Nun” gorges on gorgeous gothic visuals. “The Nun” also overfeeds on typical tropes like a choir chanting on the soundtrack, slowly searching cavernous cellars exclusively by lantern light, and more shrieking ghosts than a jump scare abacus can count. Still, sincere performances from Demian Bichir and Taissa Farmiga, along with supporting sisters who treat Valak as a truly sinister spirit, channel a strange sense of satanic darkness from suggestive imagery involving vicious visions, a smoky graveyard, and plenty of possessed nuns wearing bloody sacks over their heads.

To be sure, the script begs for more motivation behind every arc and infinitely more depth to the demon. However, with its on par attention to showmanship and clever full circle hook back to the first “The Conjuring” (review here), “The Nun” emerges as a textbook definition of a well-made mainstream horror movie whose entertainment value is respectably above average, if wispy. Think of it like “The Exorcist” reconfigured as a drive-in movie, and I mean that as a compliment. Mostly.

Review Score: 65

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