Director: Corin Hardy
Year: 2018
Rating: R
Running Time: 1 hour, 36 minutes
A priest and young novitiate from the Vatican are sent to an abbey in Romania to investigate the suicide of a nun who lived in the convent. Once there, they find much more than they were looking for and discover that the abbey is a cursed, evil place haunted by a dangerous demon.
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| "This evil needs a vessel to escape...you know what to do." (Image Source) |
You know how many scary moments there are in "The Nun"? Nun! We're sure this joke has been made a thousand times elsewhere, but we couldn't resist. You think that pun is bad? Well, it's not half as bad as this movie, which is directed by Corin Hardy, who has also directed the 2015 horror flick "The Hollow." It is written by "The Conjuring" director James Wan and Gary Dauberman, who wrote both the terrible "Annabelle" and the shockingly respectable "Annabelle: Creation." This story takes place in 1952 at an abbey in Romania. It centers on a young novitiate named Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga). Along with a priest named Father Burke (Demian Bichir), the pair have been sent to this abbey to investigate the suicide of a nun who was living in the convent there. Upon arriving, the whisperings of the local townspeople turn out to be right: the abbey houses a great evil, and it may actually be a doorway that allows unpure spirits into our world. Now, these God-fearing heroes must exorcise this malevolent spirit and close the doorway for good, or die trying.
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| "This place is...what's the opposite of a miracle, Father?" (Image Source) |
We enjoyed both
"The Conjuring" and
"The Conjuring 2." We borderline hated
"Annabelle," but we thought this universe was course-corrected nicely with
"Annabelle: Creation." Warner Bros. latest offering, "The Nun," seems to have spiraled the franchise out of control once again. This entire series is no stranger to jump scares, but usually, these films combine tired cliches with tension-filled atmosphere, interesting characters, and an engaging enough story. Try as he might, director Corin Hardy fails to produce a genuinely creepy atmosphere, and the jump scares are predictable, cheesy, and ineffective. The characters aren't all that interesting, nor is the story. We found ourselves uninterested and bored for most of its runtime. In fact, I actually fell asleep for a minute or two. Too bad BigJ woke me up, but he didn't want to suffer through this experience alone, and I couldn't in good conscience do that to him anyway. What was the scene immediately after I woke up, you ask? A shattered mirror jump scare, of course! Don't get us wrong, there are a couple intriguing visuals from time to time, but it's obvious Hardy didn't know how to utilize them to his advantage to frighten the audience properly.
Instead of focusing on plot points and the goings-on of the characters (because let's be real, it is so dismally written that it was hard to focus on anything but its persistent dullness), the only thing we were interested in was whether or not Sister Irene was supposed to be a young Lorraine Warren. We were left questioning this the entire runtime. It may be trivial, but it bothered us a lot when the answer never came. It may have been a mistake to cast Vera Farmiga's younger sister Taissa in the part since she looks almost exactly like a juvenile version of her big sister. Is it just some weird coincidence that Sister Irene and Lorraine Warren look alike and have the same abilities? Will Warner Brothers be exploring this concept in the next inevitable installment of the CCU (Conjuring Cinematic Universe)? Or, is it all tied together so poorly that we, in fact, missed the answers to our query? Beyond this annoyance, "The Nun" falls prey to pretty much every horror cliche in the book, right down to a random exposition person whose only purpose is to explain the history of the abbey.
Brief cool imagery aside,
"The Nun" is a total unimaginative snooze and is not worth your time or your money.
My Rating: 2.5/10
BigJ's Rating: 3/10
IMDB's Rating: ~5.8/10
Rotten Tomatoes Rating: ~26%
Do we recommend this movie: AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE!!!
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