The Nun II (2023)

Score: 2 / 5

The Conjuring and its subsequent franchise are important, there's no doubt about that. But why the brilliant likes of James Wan & Co. would entrust their series to an incompetent artist like Michael Chaves is beyond me. Unlike the Saw franchise, which Wan and Whannell long since wrote off and disowned after their iconic first installment, they keep actively producing entries in this haunted-house-meets-possession series (along with Insidious), and I for one enjoy all of them so far. But Chaves's films -- starting with The Curse of La Llorona, then The Devil Made Me Do It, and now this -- are easily my least favorite of the bunch. His aesthetic style is almost nonexistent, his storytelling ability negligible, and his films dull between only occasionally effective jump scares.

And this from someone who really enjoys Valak, the "demon nun," who has become the primary antagonist of this franchise. She first appeared in The Conjuring 2, in some of its most terrifying moments, as a vengeful force determined to haunt Lorraine Warren. Valak has since made appearances in Annabelle: Creation -- which implies her involvement with the Annabelle demon Malthus -- and in her own spin-off The Nun. That film, a magnificent exercise in excess, notably attempted a new flavor of Grand Guignol camp in the genre that is rare (one that surely informed the aesthetic of this year's The Pope's Exorcist). And with something like a toothy, yellow-faced nun haunting cloistered abbeys, that approach was brilliant.

I had hoped that a sequel to that film would double down on this aesthetic, legitimizing it and continuing the titular nun's legacy as a spooky Halloween staple. But Chaves and his team, in slowing the pace, trivializing the story, and sapping the film of excitement and ingenuity, makes the film a miserable low point in the franchise while ensuring another film must be made. Granted, it's possible that the greenlit The Conjuring: Last Rites will wrap everything up, but either way, The Nun II proves itself a redundant and superfluous entry that adds fluff where it is neither needed nor wanted.

It begins five years after the first film, with Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga) befriending novitiate Debra at a convent in Italy (Storm Reid) as they are tasked to investigate a string of deaths across Europe. Each murder, gruesome and violent like the immolation that opens this film, is enacted on religious leaders such as priests and are being attributed to the influence of a demon. Irene already has her suspicions that it's the one that got away. So to speak. On their travels, they learn a bit about Valak's demonic origins and learn that everyone being murdered is in some way related to St Lucy, patron saint of the blind whose eyes were kept as holy relics. Irene is also subjected to visions of Maurice (Jonas Bloquet), which lead her to France.

Intercut with these developments, we see Maurice working at a French boarding school as groundskeeper and maintenance man. He befriends a young Irish girl there, but we're shown several scenes of him speaking with an invisible force and acting, well, possessed. The girls play games in the attic that turn violent after they encounter a demonic goat that terrorizes them. Maurice's resistance crumbles until we become certain that Valak -- surprise! -- wasn't banished to hell at the end of the first film but instead, weakened, latched onto Maurice. Except this isn't a surprise to us, because we saw a sign of it on Maurice's neck at the end of the previous film. Another redundancy.

The incompetent screenplay by Ian B. Goldberg (The Autopsy of Jane Doe, Eli, Fear the Walking Dead) doesn't stop there. After an early conversation between Irene and Debra (who are both wonderful and deserved a lot more to do) in which a doubting Debra asks about the miracle of the Eucharist and transubstantiation, I suspected we'd be treated to some miracle about that. After much ado, and Irene finally unmasks Valak -- again -- she needs the blood of Christ -- again -- to vanquish Valak -- again. But the precious vial of it from the first movie is gone, of course! What is she to do? Lo and behold, we're spoon-fed the explanation (in case you didn't see it coming) that Irene is in fact a descendant of St. Lucy, hence her visions and Valak's obsession with her, and so she uses the relic to stall Valak. Renewed with faith, Irene and Debra pray together and the wine (the school used to be a winery after it was also a convent?) spontaneously explodes into the blood of Christ and drowns Valak back to hell.

Except that Irene is still suspicious at film's end, we're not given any reason to think it didn't work this time. Which is infuriating, as we know that Maurice is yet to be exorcised by Lorraine Warren (who, played by Vera Farmiga, is also revealed to be a descendant of St. Lucy, which is a nice consummation of the sisterly casting choice). So somehow Valak will return in the timeline before The Conjuring, and it's just annoying to have this middling story in the meantime, forcing us to tread water before something exciting actually happens.

My biggest gripes so far have been the story, and that is fair. The performances are all solid, no question, and some of the effects are exciting. I personally really liked the demon goat, although its introduction feels more than a little like something out of The Da Vinci Code or Indiana Jones. I was annoyed at the prevalence and pedestrian quality of Valak's presence; while she's arguably more mysterious (read: shrouded in darkness to the point of incomprehensibility) here than in the previous film, there's no inventiveness to her appearance or behaviors here. She's just there, and we're desensitized to her frequent, obvious presence. I'd have preferred the Grand Guignol approach to her, but if not, then something more like in The Woman in Black. Besides Valak, the film wallows in its inability to produce earned fear, overutilizing slow pans and exaggerated sound effects to occasionally startle us rather than eke out any modicum of actual terror. It feels like the editors and producers called the shots with a stopwatch, every ten minutes or so requiring a loud bang or pop-out in order to continue.