Director: Corin Hardy
Duration: 96 unholy minutes (and like religious iconography, it gets even more unholy if you inverse it)
There’s something about the Catholic Church that lends itself well to horror. Religions have such a long history and connect to our primal fears about life and death. Religion is interwoven with our political history and records of violence and revolution. They also come with iconography and symbols with arcane properties that have sincere enough connotations that perverting them seems to have an almost primal effect, even in the irreligious. The latest film in The Conjuring Universe, The Nun, takes that iconography and those symbols, and perverts away. I’m not sure which nun the title is referring to, but does it really matter? We get a pure nun and a creepy one, and they dichotomise themselves in a clash of light and dark imagery about as effectively as you can imagine.
Some actors are gifted with a physicality that lends them qualities they barely need to, excuse the pun, conjure up anything. Taissa Farmiga has a face that is easy to project purity onto. She’s a wonderful choice for the good nun in white. Horror films, with their specific colour palettes, can get bleak, so finding a warm face is important in creating enough of a feeling of hope. Demián Bichir also looks appropriately cast as the priest with who seems ready to play Van Helsing after taking a few shots of whiskey. Jonas Bloquet manages to make a potentially creepy and underdeveloped role charming enough. Everyone is easy enough to like enough, which is important to making us care when cameras start panning to reveal bad nuns in black.
Technically, this movie does everything it sets out to. I find the idea of ghostly nuns creepier than the reality of make-up and special effects. The Nun takes some risks by showing us what it shows us, instead of leaving it up to the nightmares of moviegoers. This universe has built up enough of a positive reputation in how sincere it wants to be about its thrills that I think it gets some leeway. There were no awkward laughs when the nun starts poking her tongue out and roaring with a booming voice. There are some scenes that are visually set up to be quite interesting, and the blocking of some scenes feels “cheap” in how it obscures details we really wish to know now to get ahead of the scare, but that’s a part of the ride, isn’t it?
I have been more existentially scared in horror movies. There’s ripe ground for historical atrocities and centuries of secrets that The Nun only skirts over. When it comes to breaking open the seal to hell, it doesn’t really dig that deep. It’s more interested in being a clothesline for loosely related imagery. It feels like it borrows from a few different nightmares, and wants to project those on a screen, like a more cohesive Un Chien Andalou (1929). There were times when my analytical brain stood outside the action and thought about how The Nun was trying to work, as opposed to my emotional one just letting it work on me. It tries a lot, and it never falls drastically short, but when you’re trying so much it’s unlikely that all of it is going to be a complete success. The problem with other people’s nightmares is that they seem silly because it’s not your subconscious.
You probably already know if The Nun is a film for you. Horror is such a wide spectrum with so many specific tastes. This is a popcorn horror that never goes so far into the forest that you feel like you can’t turn back. Some horror fans will no doubt hate that. Others thrive on this sort of stuff. I found the cast likable, the aesthetic generally immersive, and everything competent enough. Sure, it’s a little silly that some spawn of Satan can have their head blown off with a shotgun for the sake of plot convenience, and that others seem to exist solely to stand in shadows and jump out at the right time to be a mild nuisance, but this a strand of horror that doesn’t exist to scare the soul or take itself too seriously. It even gives one of its heroes an action hero line. I can’t remember if it came after setting a nun on fire or scolding one with the alleged blood of Jesus Christ, but it was so awful that I can only assume that was the point. If you take your horror seriously, maybe start with the other Conjuring Universe movies and work your way up to this one, but it isn’t really a prerequisite to enjoy seeing blood poured onto a nun.
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