It was only a few weeks ago that theaters received their second “young American woman seeking to become a nun arrives in a sinister Italian convent” movie within a month, as if to further hammer home that nunsploitation and the 2020s have been particularly good bedfellows. From the devilish duo of the unnerving The First Omen to the gonzo Immaculate, to FX’s Black Narcissus remake and Paul Verhoeven’s provocative Benedetta, creepiness and craziness cloaked in a habit has had a strong run over the last few years. So it’s safe to say that James Wan and director Corin Hardy were ahead of the curve with 2018’s The Nun. The fifth installment in the Conjuring franchise, this film does not measure up against the best in the series, but its zeitgeist-anticipating subject matter and wealth of cinematic allusions make it ripe for a reconsideration.
A period tie-in providing backstory for the demonic Warren nemesis Valak, The Nun does in many ways deserve its shaky reputation. The movie may shift its setting from 1970s suburban comfort to a 1950s Romanian abbey haunted by death, and shift protagonists from the ghost-hunting Warrens to Demián Bichir’s Father Burke and Taissa Farmiga’s Sister Irene, but none of those changes can alter the fact that this is a jump-scare fest carried on the shoulders of underdeveloped walking archetypes and plot devices. One would be hard-pressed to find a better example of late-2010s horror shackled by unimaginative genre trappings and the weight of franchise obligations. At its worst, The Nun comes across as imitation James Wan: all the startles and scares one would expect from his distinct brand of ghostly horror, but none of the suspense or variety. Whenever the plot seems ready to fully tip into exciting tonal territory, those chains to the existing franchise pull the film back to safe, bland ground.
Yet beneath all that painfully well-trodden surface lies another movie screaming to be released, a better, more vibrant and startling work that’s able to pierce through the rote material in surprising and grisly moments. As The Nun unfolds, it becomes increasingly clearer that, much like the creatives behind First Omen and Immaculate, Hardy has a soft spot for ‘80s and ‘90s Italian horror and Eurohorror. That wouldn’t be too unexpected considering his debut feature The Hallow was a wild mix of Irish fey folk horror, fungal body horror and unnatural home invasion thriller; just the kind of bizarre genre film chimera that would’ve thrived in an earlier decade.
Between The Nun’s bland scares lie scenes that seem to riff on everything from Lucio Fulci to Hammer: a nod to the pickaxe piercing the coffin in Fulci’s City of the Living Dead, a misty cemetery full of oversized crosses not unlike the iconic imagery of 1960’s City of the Dead, a monstrous being rising from cracked earth like Michele Soavi’s The Church, skeletal undead rising from crypts in a moment that recalls the titular terrors of Tomb of the Blind Dead. When The Nun stops trying to imitate Wan’s style, it becomes a film plucked from another era entirely. That film is gleefully eager to show the gory visage of a crow-torn face or to indulge in one-liners, ancient relic hunts or sword decapitations of zombie demon nuns. Fog-choked nightmare-logic set-pieces like a dark, stormy passage twisting Inception-style escalate into a final act of heroes under occult siege by hordes of shadowy habit-wearing wraiths, keeping the evil at bay with shotguns and holy flames. Compared to the most recent nun-centric horror releases, Hardy’s film succeeds as a homage-heavy love letter to schlockier and more gonzo eras of horror, but not in fully embodying those styles enough to really stick the landing. Ironically, like non-demon-infested religious orders the world over, this film seems bent on repressing its baser instincts.
The Nun is undeniably a film of two clashing identities. It’s the safe franchise prequel tie-in constantly bound by those ties and it’s also the demonic undead horror adventure eager to get bloody, wild and over the top, resulting in an extremely mixed film whose conflicting styles butt heads constantly throughout the runtime. But it’s also a film whose entertaining thrills and chills overcome its forgettable by-the-numbers everything else. If The First Omen and Immaculate have left an itch for more modern horror odes to pre-2000s Eurohorror and Italian supernatural bedlam, then Corin Hardy’s The Nun stands as something that just might satisfy, in its own divisive, discombobulated way.
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