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The Nun

Positioned as a prequel to The Conjuring in which the demon Valak makes her first appearance, The
Nun tells the origin story of the demonic nun set in 1952.

Directed by Corin Hardy and written by James Wan, who has had a hand in all the movies in the
series
, The Nun starts off promisingly enough, but there is just too much wrong with this movie for it
to be taken seriously.

By throwing almost every horror trope imaginable at the viewer, The Nun is a soulless predictable
mess which doesn’t do the series justice.

Prequel to The Conjuring

Set in 1952, two nuns at the Romanian Abbey of St. Carta are forced to confront a demonic presence
and while one is wholly consumed by the presence, the other commits suicide to prevent the evil
from taking her hostage.

Father Burke, an experienced priest played by Demian Bichir, is instructed by the Vatican to
investigate the incident and is partnered with a young novitiate, Sister Irene, played by Taissa
Farmiga.

The two head to Romania but find the investigation challenging owing to the strange behaviour of
the residents of the abbey.

Many Missed Opportunities

The film seems promising at first especially as Hardy makes haunting use of the Romanian setting,
but it quickly divulges into a holy mess. We get little sense of the central characters which causes the
film to lose its humanity and with it the viewer’s empathy for the heroes.

While Father Burke isn’t secretly playing at a casino no deposit, he has a complicated past owing to a
wartime exorcism performed on a young boy, but little is made of this. On the other hand, Sister
Irene is subjected to religious visions, but all the visions offer is an obvious but pointless clue
revealed at the end of the film.

Predicative Horror Tropes

Regrettably, the feelings of tension and menace masterfully created at the beginning of the film
quickly dissipate and viewers are instead subjected to every horror trope known to man.

Of course, hands reach from the darkness and grab unsuspecting people, crosses turn upside down
of their own free will, and nuns are set careening across the floor or seem to spontaneously combust
– unfortunately we’ve seen it all before.

Gasps of dread quickly turn to sighs of boredom as nothing is left unseen or unspoken in The Nun
and the anticipation on which all great horror movies rely is non-existent.

Horror Mastery: The Conjuring

While The Nun is set as a prequel to The Conjuring, the series seems to have strayed off the path to
greatness along the way. The Conjuring is made brilliant by the perfect balance of a relentless sense
of dread combined adeptly with a deeply human story.

We find ourselves caring for the characters which makes the horror they are forced to endure that
much more affecting. However, all the elements which made The Conjuring a horror masterpiece are
missing from The Nun and the series seems to have doubled down on predictable jump scares and
genre typical pyrotechnics.

 

© David Nusair