Movie Breakdown: The Nun (Noah)
Pre-Screening Stance:
The Conjuring is a great movie. Did it deserve a sequel and then three different “shared universe” spin-offs of varying degrees of quality? My guess is no, but hey, Hopeful Harold over here.
Post-Screening Ramble:
The Nun, at best, is an at-times entertaining movie lost in the thralls of trying to be every branch of horror cinema all at once. A paranormal Catholic investigator (Demian Bichir) is tasked to travel to Romania to investigate the suicide of a nun. He assembles a decidedly lacking team – a vision-seeing novitiate (Taissa Farmiga) and a French-Canadian, uh, guy (Jonas Bloquet). They enter a haunted abbey and, well, shit goes down. To be honest, there is so much horror in these troubled times that it isn’t a particularly bad strategy to just heave everything slightly horrific at the screen and see what sticks, it just doesn’t make for a particularly cohesive or good movie. Instead The Nun crams Evil Dead horror-humor, non-ironic Gregorian chants, Indiana Jones-style adventure, witty banter and more into a tight hour and half while loosely (so very very loosely) attempting to hang it on the side of James Wan’s Conjuring franchise. Corin Hardy isn’t a bad director – his two-toned ghost nun army near the end is decidedly creepy – but he, or the producers yanking on his puppet strings – can’t decide what sort of movie he wants to make, so The Nun ends up being sub-par at a whole slew of sub-genres. It’s a horror-comedy without very much humor, a religious horror flick with almost no religion, and an adventure romp where all the adventure is stuffed into twenty second collages. Demian Bechir and Taissa Farmiga are fine (though Jonas Bloquet’s “naughty” Frenchman half-assedly steals the show) but they’re resigned to asking the questions to drive the plot forward. Which sums up The Nun – a movie where everything plods forward because it’s a horror movie in 2018, and that’s just what it’s supposed to do.
One Last Thought:
For some reason, even though The Nun departed my brain moments after I saw it, the sheer fact that there are other movies vaguely connected to it makes me feel like I need to see those movies. Even though I’m assured that outside of the main flicks in this series, they’re probably all stumbling horror bloat like this.
Another Last Thought:
The attempt to connect this film to The Conjuring is awful. It strips the film of having any real ending and I just don’t see how this movie strengthens the overall work of the original films. When can we throw the last pile of dirt on all non-Marvel shared universes?
