Apart from two or three gen­uinely scary heart-in-your-mouth moments, the ‘The Conjuring’ spin-off ‘The Nun’ is low on plot and even lower on atmo­sphere and tension. This is a period horror replete with gothic imagery and Catholic mysticism. But the gothic aesthetics is sparsely effec­tive and mostly bland while the uncooked screenplay from Gary Dauberman (the noted writer of ‘It’ and ‘Annabelle: Creation’) is full of subpar ideas that try to fill the entire run-time with information dumping instead of invoking any emotional hook points. The attempt is to tell an origin story of the demonic nun who has made several appearances across ‘The Conjuring’ movie universe. This film traces her roots back to 1952, to a remote Christian monas­tery in Romania. As the film opens, two nuns pass through the monas­tery’s dark hallway and stop right outside a sinister looking door. Seconds later an unseen creature attacks both of them.

 

 

The news of their death travels to the Vatican where a board of high ranking clergymen decides to send Father Burke (Demian Bichir) to investigate the spooky activities in the monastery. Father Burke is advised to recruit young Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga), who’s training to be a nun and has some strange psy­chic abilities. Together they reach the haunted monastery with the sole intent of knowing about the evil spirit lurking inside the place and casting her out.

 

 

The problem with ‘The Nun’ is that director Corin Hardy resorts to old-school horror trickery of jump scares and loud background scores. He and his writer make the cardinal sin in horror: revealing too much. The monster that haunts this pic­ture makes repetitive appearances and overexploitation of her pres­ence slowly wanes her impact from being terrorizing to tedious. There’s a sense of haste and incompleteness as the story moves forward in ran­dom directions.

 

 

Bichir and Farmiga, the two leads of the film, show no integ­rity to their loosely defined char­acters. Their outside snooping to unravel the mystery feels mechan­ical and fails to make us care about their ghost hunting. Despite this, there’s one well executed sequence involving a priest trapped inside a coffin, which hints of what the movie could’ve been if the makers were open to inventive horror tricks.

 

 

When ‘The Conjuring’ first came out, it paved the way for medium-budget horror films with high sense of scare and thrills. Its religious narrative and period setting were refreshing for hor­ror audiences who were getting tired of special effects horror. In a short time it established itself as a brand, resulting in byproducts like ‘The Nun’ that tarnishes the image of the original by committing the mistakes the original one so care­fully sidestepped.

 

 

Some movies are so forgettable, you have zero memory of them. ‘The Nun’ falls in the same cate­gory. It’s a quick cash grab from the studio that’s feeding off the loyalty of fans of the original film by giving them a second-rate entertainer. This contributes nothing substantial to the overall universe of ‘The Con­juring’. The only thing left to do is wait for James Wan (the creator and director of the original) to rejuve­nate the series.