The Nun: Review

A young nun (Taissa Farmiga) and a priest (Demián Bichir) investigate the demonic forces at work in a Romanian Abbey.

Yet another victim of the James Wan school of jumpscares, The Nun is an underwhelming cliché of horror movie tropes.

Like Insidious 4: The Last Key, The Nun is another horror film that falls into the 'show and then tell' dialogue trap. Although there were some genuinely unnerving moments scattered throughout the film, the problem lies in the fact that the director (Corin Hardy) feels the need to explain every single scare through the dialogue. A prime example of this is an early sequence where Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga), Father Burke (Demián Bichir), and a villager, Frenchie, (Jonas Bloquet) come back to the Abbey to find the dead body of a nun sitting upright. The scare lies in one line of dialogue; Frenchie is taken aback by the nun and states, "That's not how I left her". This is a moment that had so much potential - but the audience never saw how Frenchie left the nun's body before, we're just expected to be frightened by the idea that it could have moved, rather than seeing this for ourselves. The scares in The Nun lack any ounce of subtlety.

The performances were average, and it’s obvious the actors did the best they could with these underdeveloped, cliché characters, particularly Frenchie. He was written as such a douchebag, the kind of guy who would quite literally flirt with a nun, making it incredibly hard to root for him in the climactic fight with the demon nun Valak.

The Nun is a disappointing failure, particularly as the concept was relatively unique and interesting, and some fantastic imagery seeped through the cracks - particularly the scene of Frenchie discovering the nun's body hanging from the Abbey - but its potential was stifled by the cliche jumpscares, and Hollywood's desperate need to create a potential love interest between Frenchie and Sister Irene.

The Nun was better than expected, but by no means does that make it even half decent.