Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Nun II’ on Max, a The Latest Entry in the ‘Conjuring’ Universe

The Nun II (now streaming on Max) is the continuing story of a demon who has a bad habit of possessing people and forcing them to come up with grotesque puns. The movie is the eighth installment in a loosely connected franchise I refuse to call The Conjuring Universe, and the sequel to 2018’s notable global hit The Nun. Taissa Farmiga returns to play Sister Irene, who gets another opportunity to chase off a demon named Valak, who, like most demons, is ugly and not very nice, and unlike other demons, manifests as a vestal human in order to… do… whatever it is demons are supposed to do, which probably should be more than the petty parlor tricks this one tends to indulge instead of just, you know, killing people in simple, direct, effective fashion. So yes, this movie drove me nuts, which doesn’t bode well for this review. 

THE NUN II: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: An altar boy in Tarascon, France, 1956, trucks a wine decanter up the rectory steps so he can put it away in a terrifying old location with poor lighting and a hella-creepy painting of Lucy, the Patron Saint of Blindness, who has inky black spots where her eyes should be. Just another day in terrifying religious buildngs! Before you know it, the decanter explodes and the holy water boils and the priest levitates into the air and makes a CRACKITY BONES (crackity crackity crackity bones!) noise before he bursts into flames. For anyone reading this who may not be particularly Catholic, this is not what normally happens to wine decanters, holy water or priests, and that’s why this is a movie. Because if this was just about sipping “the blood of Christ” and baptisms and the like, nobody would’ve greenlit it.

We then relocate to Romania, where nuns in a convent whisper ghost stories while they peel potatoes. Sister Irene (Farmiga) overhears them and all but yawns – she survived some of the real shit in the last movie. And that’s why she’s summoned to investigate the crap that happened in the opening scene: “The church needs another miracle,” is the pitch, and she agrees, taking her pal Sister Debra (Storm Reid) with her. In that French place where the crap is happening is a girls’ boarding school, where the handsome gent from The Nun, Maurice (Jonas Bloquet), works the grounds. He’s befriended young Sophie (Katelyn Rose Downey) and her teacher mother Kate (Anna Popplewell), and isn’t it an odd coincidence that Maurice is again present for The Nun-related shenanigans? We won’t get into that right now – spoilers and all that – and will instead mention how the school is a typical Movie School with a group of mean girls and a headmistress so gristly-tough, one presumes she flosses with piano wire.

What we will get into is The Nun’s antics, which typically involve subtle manipulation of characters so they meander quietly through dark hallways and creaky old rooms, rendering them ripe to get the lovin’ bejeezus scared out of them. Oh, The Nun gets nasty early on, killing a young messenger girl with a loud, bloody squelching sound, but after that, the dithering is endless – always with the dithering – and the kills are sparse. There’s no better way to concoct a phony-ass jump scare than to magically influence a character to walk… slowly… through… a… dark… room… and never even consider flipping on a light switch. Or, if a light actually happens to be on, The Nun will make it flicker dramatically so she can appear and disappear from one blink to the next. 

Finally, Sisters Irene and Debra arrive in France, and The Nun has a golden chance to off Irene, but instead she just knocks her out, because there’s still half the movie left. Now, you have to be wondering, what the living hell does The Nun want? There’s an answer to that question, and I won’t reveal it – again, no spoilers and all – but I do believe all this jump-scare dithering isn’t exactly the most logical and direct way to get it. 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Haven’t seen a nun this nasty since Paul Verhoeven’s naughty naked nun movie Benedetta. Otherwise, The Nun II is like Sister Act crossed with one of the shittier Nightmare on Elm Streets. 

Performance Worth Watching: Bloquet gets an opportunity to lose his shit for reasons I won’t reveal, and in that moment we get a fleeting glimpse of the movie’s rare entertaining performances. 

Memorable Dialogue: Stupidest exchange in the movie:

Sister Debra, perplexed, looking at a bipedal goat man: What is that thing?

A young girl who probably doesn’t have near the religious education of Sister Debra: It’s the devil!

Sex and Skin: None. This movie is nunsploitation-free.

Our Take: Anyone else think The Nun looks too much like Marilyn Mansnun to be scary? No offense to Bonnie Aarons, who plays The Nun, and is also the creepy homeless alley lady in Mulholland Drive, which makes her a horror hall-of-famer. But The Nun II does not show us nearly enough in the way of full metal nun-ness to make us appreciate the creep factor of a woman in Norwegian black metal-dude facepaint and a luxurious habit hissing and baring her pointy blood-caked teeth. There’s a shot or two where she looks succulent in her hideousness, a Woman of God who’s very much down for a wild evening of grinnin’ and blasphemin’, and it’s those moments when the film is at its least worst.

There are crazy things The Nun can do, whatever they are; there appears to be no limit to her power or severe limits to her power, depending on where we are in the plot. They seem to be limited in scope until it’s time for a very loud, noisy, screechy, fiery climax, and then, her abilities are rather impressive. Otherwise they’re a bland assortment of stuff like making an old crumbling plaster wall look like her face, or manifesting her visage in a series of magazines in a newsstand, or grabbing someone by the throat and not squeezing hard enough to kill them. There are also times when she can levitate herself and other things via some form of psychokinesis, and apparently summon demonic creatures, and maybe even possess a poor soul, all of which would, you’d think, help her better expedite murders and/or her evil monkey business. But she’d much rather startle folks by leaping into the frame and showing off her Lee Press-on Fangs, all the better to inspire the teenagers in the audience to pretend to be scared. My conclusion: She’s clearly the least efficient supernatural homicide-being in horror movie history.

The reason we have so much time to pick apart The Nun’s deeply flawed M.O. is simple: The Nun II is a deadass bore, clocking in at 110 minutes, 100 of which accomplish a measly f— or two shy of f—all. I mentioned the goat guy. He’s cool as shit. Badass. Pretty scary, too, as he dashes in and out of flashlight beams. Too bad he also does f—all in this plodding, bloated, dull, humorless, stifling movie. Director Michael Chaves (The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It) at least makes the film a somewhat immersive period piece, establishing 1950s France with visual textures and spooky atmosphere that go to utter waste in the pursuit of cheep-thrillz horror scarez. Chaves hammers away on the sound-effects buttons that generate the CRACKITY BONES (crackity crackity bones bones bones!) noise, and the other one that sounds like a gnu choking on a chunk of knockwurst, eventually building to a screeching conclusion with a depressingly underwhelming payoff. There was a point early on where I uttered out loud, God, I don’t care about any of this, because the entire plot is predicated on nonsense, and the characters are vacuum-brained empty vessels. You’ll lose your faith in this movie before you’re even halfway through it.

Our Call: The Nun II: Back in the Habit is ecclesiasti-DULL. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.