Is The Nun II better than the original? Sure. Is it actually a good movie? Not really. Let’s get into it.
Now, to be clear, I think The Nun II pretty much had a slam-dunk in the bag when it came to improving on what came before, as the original Nun movie is widely viewed as the worst of the often-patchy Conjuring universe; trudgingly boring and generic, it failed to take advantage of the amazing character defined by Bonnie Aarons in the original canon of Conjuring movies.
To make a worse film would have been a feat in and of itself, but that’s not to say that the sequel doesn’t have some genuine high points. Director Michael Chaves continues to develop a really strong vision for his horror movies after The Conjuring 3, with excellent scare sequences and a strong colour palette that seems to drag you briefly into another world entirely when things are at their tensest. Jonas Bloque, reprising his role from the first movie, is warm and genuinely likeable in a way that feels un-laboured and fresh, and newcomer to the franchise Storm Reid is a fun addition to the cast. The setting of post-War France is striking and distinct, and the Nun remains a killer monster design, with Aarons bringing her usual imposing presence to great effect.
But where the film fails is with a sloppy script and strange editing that leaves several loose thematic ends hanging by the time the story closes out. There’s this heavy-handed seeding for a plot about motherhood in the first act that doesn’t feel like it comes to full fruition in the third, and several scenes of the movie feel as though they’re relying on connective tissue that might have been cut to secure a sub-two-hour runtime. Taissa Farmiga has improved in her leading role as Sister Irene, but there are still a few spectacular clunkers for her in this movie that had the whole cinema I was in cackling when they really shouldn’t have been,
The longer the Conjuring franchise – horror’s great Catholic rehabilitation centre – goes on, too, the harder it becomes to ignore the lengths these films are going to avoid being even remotely critical of the Catholic church. Maybe it stands out more here, with so much of the leading cast actually being active members of the church, than it does with the slightly-removed Ed and Lorraine Warren, but the movie is almost comically positive about the church to the point where it feels downright naïve as a result. I get it, maybe this isn’t the movie to get into all of the unbelievable abuses the church committed in that century alone, but it ends up feeling closer and closer to pro-Catholic propaganda with every entry into this canon to present Catholicism as the eternal Good Guy to all this evil. We haven’t reached The Pope’s Exorcist levels of apologia yet, but we’re getting there.
So, yeah, overall: The Nun II is a better movie than the first, with some downright decent stuff crammed in there, but ultimately is let down by a messy script that fails to capitalize on some of the interesting ideas seeded early in the story. It’s on the low end of the Conjuring universe’s canon, but I doubt this is the last crack the series will be having at this villain yet.
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By Lou MacGregor
(header image via Flickering Myth)
No But Listen 