What is so scary about nuns, anyway? Many are timid or demure, and they lead quiet lives of religious servitude, often serving their communities along the way. Maybe it’s their outsider status that makes them so frightening, a holdoff of the stern nun archetype we see in countless stories about Catholic schools. Either way, filmmakers have made nuns scary for as long as there have been movies, starting with the silent horror classic Häxan (1922) and continuing onward through St. Maud (2019).
Directed by horror veteran Christopher Smith, Consecration continues in that tradition, adding a touch of folk horror along the way. All the history and influences prove immaterial, unfortunately, since Smith does not have the chops to develop a film that withstands much scrutiny. To watch the film is to get the sense that Smith was paralyzed by indecision, and so he cobbled together whatever tropes he could.
Like Shutter Island or A Cure for Wellness, at first the script by Smith and Laurie Cook draws a skeptical protagonist into an isolated area. American actor Jena Malone plays Grace, an English doctor who finds out her brother – a Catholic priest – died by suicide near a remote convent in Scotland. Grace travels there, suspecting foul play, and she is immediately met by eccentrics. Danny Huston plays Father Romero, a priest assigned by the Vatican to smooth over the scandal, and he is unafraid of throwing his patriarchal weight around, while the Mother Superior (Janet Suzman) treats Grace with a strange mix of deference and hostility. Through a mix of flashback and flashforward, we learn that Grace’s suspicions are well-founded, just not in a way that she could ever anticipate.
The moment Grace found herself in a nun’s clothing, absent a headscarf of course, she should have known to run away. There is something about donning a uniform that makes someone more susceptible to influence, at least if movies like this and its influences are to be believed. Smith and Cook, however, do not make Consecration about Grace’s inability to leave the convent. In fact, there are many scenes where she leaves and returns, mostly to confront a character or uncover another clue. The conceit diminishes any sense of paranoia; there is no real feeling that the walls are closing in on Grace, and so the middle section of the film unfolds more as a mystery.
Frequent flashbacks deepen that mystery, and suggest a disturbing past: Grace and her brother were abused by their ultra-religious Catholic father, who murdered their mother while the kids were literally locked in a cage. In these scenes, Smith cannot decide whether to focus on realism or genre exaggeration, which ultimately creates impatience in the viewer. There is a fine line between following a film’s inexorable logic and being strung along, and Consecration is on the wrong side of it.
If Smith had stuck the landing, all the fits and starts of the middle section would be immaterial. It is ironic that the final minutes are the film’s greatest blunder. Even with the introduction of violence and literal demons, Consecration is a muted affair, and a convoluted one to boot. In addition to Grace’s early life, we see flashbacks from hundreds of years ago, something Smith tries to shoehorn into the present. Like other elements, the indecision is persistent. He could have made a literal throughline about Grace’s past, laying out the plot details so we understand every connection, or he could have abstracted the details, making it more about metaphor and leaving the final minutes open to interpretation. Smith opts for something in the middle, explaining some details and not enough of them.
Consecration does not add to the tradition of scary nuns, as it lacks the conviction or imagination to consider the depths of unhinged piety. At least this film creates a good rule of thumb when reflecting on a horror film’s success. They’re only worth a damn when they reinforce some persistent idea or create new ones, and not when they make us question why the subject was ever that scary in the first place.
Photo courtesy of IFC Films
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