13 FOR HALLOWEEN #13: The Nun

The prologue to ‘Annabelle Creation’ takes place in 1943, with the remainder (i.e. the bulk) of that film taking place in 1955. ‘The Nun’ is set entirely in 1952: indeed the entire film takes place over two days. Which kind of makes ‘The Nun’ episode 1.5 in the ‘Conjuring’ multiverse.

This distinction is wholly irrelevant.

James Wan’s ‘The Conjuring’ was a pretty fucking great haunted house movie that proved he can be an astoundingly good director the moment you cut him loose from the fuck-awfulness of frequent collaborator Leigh Whannell’s scripts. ‘The Conjuring’ spawned two prequels: ‘Annabelle’, which was borderline terrible, and ‘Annabelle Creation’ which was damned good on a level almost equal to ‘The Conjuring’.

‘The Conjuring 2’ wasn’t quite as good as its predecessor but remains a rock solid and occasionally inspired haunted house movie with a cluster of good performances and a commitment to a grimly realistic urban aesthetic.

These distinctions are utterly relevant.

To put it simply: ‘The Conjuring’, ‘The Conjuring 2’, ‘Annabelle’ and ‘Annabelle Creation’ all take place within a post-war 35 year span, all are set in recognisable western locations (three of them in either urban or rural America, one partly in America and mainly in the economically strangled England of the late 70s), all are relatively realistic in their set-ups (i.e. they establish normal characters leading normal lives against unremarkable backgrounds) prior to the intrusion of the supernatural, and all of them are populated by characters who make logical and understandable decisions (in both of the ‘Conjuring’ films, the homeowners only take so much supernatural shit before they get the fuck out of their respective properties).

‘The Nun’ bucks the trend in every respect. It’s set in Romania. Its depiction of Romania is as if a Val Newton b&w chiller got jiggy with Michel Soavi’s ‘The Church’ and Lucio Fulci was called away from a screening of Powell & Pressburger’s ‘Black Narcissus’ to be the godfather. Its main characters are basically a Vatican hired gun and a yet-to-take-her-vows sister who has visions from God. The supernatural doesn’t need to intrude because it’s been strutting all over the screen waving its big Satanic dick in the audience’s face from the start, and Vatican McGuyver and Sister Plot Device abandon any semblance of logical decision making the moment they arrive at the spooky old convent, a modus operandi that achieves its apogee when they descend into the bowels of the edifice to confront an ancient and all-powerful evil and decide that the best way to defeat it is by splitting up and allowing the bad shit to feed off their respective vulnerabilities. Which is kind of like the Ghostbusters ditching the equipment, blindfolding themselves, and stumbling towards Mr Stay Puft and the Slimer clad in t-shirts emblazoned with ‘ALL GHOSTS ARE BASTARDS’ and making the wanker sign instead of the sign of the cross. Also, there’s some total bollocks about the blood of Christ that Dan fucking Brown would have been embarrassed to come up with.

Ladies and gentlemen: ‘The Nun’.

The film opens in full-on gothic style with two nuns – a stern mother superior type and a hot chick who looks more like a Victoria’s Secret model than a bride of Christ – facing up to some demonic something under the convent. The mother superior type is dragged into the stygian darkness by an unseen force. The hot chick flees back to her cell, but said something pursues her. Terrified, she loops a rope around her neck and pitches herself from a high window.

Cut to: Vatican City. Vatican McGuyver, a.k.a. Father Burke (Demián Bichir) attends a meeting at the Vatican. The other attendees include Cardinal Conroy (David Horovitch) and Bishop Pasquale (Michael Smiley) and they all speak wid Oirish accents and mayk wid da t’ousand yahrd stares and the audience would be forgiven if they expected the lot of them to cut loose with the effing and blinding like this was a ‘Boondock Saints’ spin-off. Hey, Fadder Burke, dis nun fokken trew herself out a winduh ‘n’ dat’s a mortal fokken sin sae fokk yersen off ta Rahmaynyah ‘n’ if ’tis the Divvel, kick his fokken ahrse. ‘N’ whoile yer about it, tek Sister Not Confirmed Yet wid yer on account of shhhh that’d be tellin’.

If the Catholic Church ever bankrolled an ecclesiastical reboot of ‘Mission: Impossible’, this would be the pre-credits sequence of the pilot episode.

So we swiftly find ourselves in Romania as Burke and yet-to-be-Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga). They team up with Frenchie (Jonas Bloquet) – so named because he’s French-Canadian – who undertakes to drive them out to the convent. Weird shit ensues. That’s weird shit as in … well, I did the whole Val Newton-Michel Soavi-Powell & Pressburger-Lucio Fulci comparison a few paragraphs ago, and if that isn’t enough to indicate how bat-shit crazy ‘The Nun’ is, then I might as well throw in the towel and quit writing film reviews.

In some respects, it’s check-list stuff: Gateway to hell? Tick. Priest haunted by an exorcism that went terribly wrong? Tick. Visions of dead kid from aforementioned exorcism? Tick. Fog-wreathed graveyards? Tick. Premature burial? Tick. Fuckloads of crosses at wonky angles? Tick. Massively unsubtle music cues? Tick. Over-reliance on jump scares? Tick. Jaw-droppingly over-the-top supernatural smackdown involving a demon and the actual blood of Christ? Tick. Cynical coda that ties a supporting character in to the original ‘Conjuring’? Tick.

I’d be tempted to say that it’s filmmaking by committee, except that the committee in question must have been binge-watching 1970s and ’80s Italian horror movies and doing large quantities of hallucinogenics. You can level a lot of justifiable criticism at ‘The Nun’ – and you’d have to look elsewhere for someone to argue its case as one of the better entries in the ‘Conjuring’ cycle – but one thing you could never accuse it of being is dull.