‘I’m afraid there is something very wrong with this place…’
One of my earliest memories is of going to church. The towering church building, the strange sound of the singing, the solemn intonations of the priest. Mostly, I remember our lord Jesus Christ, in his usual pose, face stricken with pain, blood around his hands and feet, and a spear wound in his side. This troubled my young mind to the point where I still have nightmares about it now. This early encounter with the ancient overtures of religion has ensured that any horror movie based around Catholicism should be a home run. And so, to The Nun…
When a pious and devout nun commits suicide in a cloistered abbey in Romania, a novitiate (Taissa Farmiga) and a priest (Demien Bichir) are sent to investigate. Normally, plot description would take up an entire paragraph, but the story here is so paper thin that one of my English students could have come up with it in five minutes. This is not always necessarily a bad thing, overconvulated plots are up there with unnecessarily long running times in terms of my greatest cinematic bugbears, but in this case, horror veteran Gary Dauberman could have perhaps fleshed out this concept a little more.
A weak storyline needn’t be the death of a horror film. There are plenty of great movies that survive on the basis of a single concept. Fear is often so visceral that that’s all it takes. The Nun doesn’t offer much above cheap, haunted house scares and tired terror tropes that we have all seen many times before – not least within the very cinematic universe The Nun originated from. I’m not a lover of the Conjuring movies generally, so the house style that is adopted here doesn’t do much for me. Despite the best efforts of Farmiga in the main role, The Nun offers little in terms of emotional resonance and even less on the scareometer.
Horror movie sequels are, by their very nature, cash ins. The Nun was the most successful movie in the whole Conjuring universe, and yet, it left me cold. The Conjuring and Insidious movies were clearly important cultural touchstones, but their rogues gallery of tricks and treats feels tired now. Do we really need three Annabelle movies? Did we even need one? Alas, it is pointless to ask because while ever they keep making money, these sequels will still be churned out every Halloween. Indeed, an untitled sequel to The Nun is all set to drop in 2021.