This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labour of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movie being covered here wouldn't exist.
The Conjuring franchise is a strange entity, a cinematic universe with a strange grasp on the concept of “true story”. Yes, there was a man called Ed Warren and he was indeed married to a woman called Lorraine and they both claimed to have been paranormal investigators, but aside from that the franchise is really built on the concept that vague Catholic pseudo babble is compelling.
For the most part the franchise has been right. James Wan's first two entries reinvigorated the haunted house genre, and gave rise to spin-offs focussing on the spooky Annabelle doll and the demon Nun Valek. Director Michael Chaves, having directed franchise entries The Curse of La Llorona and The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It,takes over from Corin Hardy for The Nun II.
This sequel-spin off-prequel might be the dullest entry in the franchise to date. Chaves has one trick; he takes a while showing someone walking and then makes a loud bang. He might be the dullest director to grace the franchise, lacking James Wan's wit, David F Sandberg's meticulous planning, Corin Hardy's sense of setting, Gary Dauberman's characterisation and even John R. Leonetti's stripped down “get it done” sensibility.
The film is graced, however, by Taissa Farmiga as Sister Irene. Traumatised by the first film, she feels indebted to Jonas Bloquet's Frenchie and so is duty-bound to save him from the demon nun. Farmiga, much like her sister, grounds the entire film with her sympathetic portrayal of Irene, creating a sense of broken strength with the slightest look around the corner.
For some bizarre reason the plot is cracked in two so we have a dull MacGuffin chasing subplot involving Irene and a novice nun played by Storm Reid, and running concurrently, Frenchie working as a handyman in a girl's boarding school, connecting with single mum and teacher Anna Popplewell and her daughter.
There's little emotional investment in the film, and almost all the scares are basic quiet, quiet, quiet, loud noise, screaming type things. When character becomes focus, and it's fleeting, the film becomes all the more compelling with Frenchie's burgeoning romance given a tragic quality given a demon nun has latched onto his soul and keeps killing people. By the time the film gets to it's shrieking throw-shit-at-the-wall finale, there is a sense that this could have been better had it been given to a stronger filmmaker. There's no sense of dread, nor emotion, both of which Wan would have given in spades.
Instead we have a standard issue bump-in-the-night, exposition dumping movie that does nothing with the prequel/spin-off format, meaning we know no more about Valak by the end of the film than we did when The Conjuring 2 began.
For a complete break-down, the two stars are awarded as follows: One is for Taissa Farmiga actually trying to inject life into the film and her passionate delivery of the word “Demon”, and the the other is for a pretty decent sequence in which a magazine stand starts flipping through pages of different issues, slowing creating the image of the nun across several magazines.
Reasons to see this film? Nun.
The Nun II releases in UK cinemas on 8th September
