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The Nun (2018), R, ★1/2


The Conjuring is one of the more brilliant horror movies of the decade as it generated some scares, thrills without relinquishing any gore to make the movie entertaining. The movie relied on the story, propelling its subject matter as the scary element to drive the narrative forward and it succeeded, generating critical and commercial success and hyping up a second movie, which was good but not great. But, it spanned these spin-offs, with the Annabelle movies, which one of them was terrible and the other was decent. Now, we have another movie focusing on a character that is debatably popular to some regard, but it does not pay off in the long run because of its lagged narrative and not much scares.

The movie takes place in 1952 at the Carta Monastery in Romania as a suicide is brought upon by Vatican officials. The Vatican officials enlist Father Anthony Burke (Damian Bichir) to investigate. He seeks out a young novitiate/teacher named Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga). They both join in on the investigation and find Frenchie (Jonas Bloquet), a man who seeked out the nun who committed suicide. They both discover that a sinister and unholy entity has been released from Hell and roams around the Earth to find a body to inhabit.


The movie has a simplistic plot in which the priests have to find the entity and release it back to Hell. The movie is straight-to-the-finish predictable and that is bad because I wanted to be invested in the atmosphere and the story again but it is drowned in Dolby surround sound, cliched jump scares and inconsistent logic that in the end, the movie becomes anticlimactic. But, what this movie does avoid is not taking risks because the horror genre has changed with many of the horror movies this decade have taken risks and paid off well enough to be talked about, whether if it is divisive or not. I can see many fans of the franchise be bored of this movie and thinking what may happen in the end.

I will give the actors credit for bolstering strong performances especially Taissa Farmiga, who is the sister of actress Vera Farmiga. She has ammunition of a strong repertoire of great performances in her arsenal if the right directors and casting agents find her because she has a future based on this performance. Demian Bichir does what he can in the cliche role of the investigator. Bonnie Aarons looks terrifying as the titular Nun but did not scare me which was odd because I anticipated the scares, which was disappointing.

Director Corin Hardy crafted the set-pieces and atmosphere well but it does not do anything to back the boring story up. Even though I admire the craftsmanship behind the settings, my experience was like looking at a masterful stage with a nearly empty play that has just scary Halloween decorations just roaming around not making sense trying to generate scares. (Hey, Halloween is coming up in less than two months.) This is not as deplorable as Annabelle but it is unfortunately close to that level. The Conjuring universe to high of a bar to mess up and they did with The Nun.

*1/2



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