True horror lies in anticipation, but The Nun will have none of it. The new instalment from The Conjuring Universe reveals its cards so early that nothing remains unexpected. All you get are jump-scares, turnaround camera gimmicks and non-stop ominous music set to your predictable tunes, beat by beat.
The Conjuring Universe since the James Wan original, has unexpectedly become a rival to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, going back and forth in time, building new stories on props and characters, instead of opting for a serialised format.
The nun (Bonnie Aarons) who appeared first as an eerie annotation in The Conjuring 2, now gets a full movie to unleash new realms of terror.
Since it’s a cosmos building exercise, stacking upon previous clues, and leaving more clues to pave further chapters in the series, the film works as a clockwork of tricks that doesn’t have much inventiveness at its disposal.
Set in 1952, The Nun is supposed to be a prequel to all the hullabaloo that has taken place so far in the Conjuring series. Getting straight down to business, the film kicks off with two nuns coming face to face with a demonic presence in a Romanian monastery. The malevolent presence kills one nun, and the other kills herself to thwart the evil’s attempt to possess her body. Now, the Vatican is necessarily riled up, and they assign two sentries to solve the mystery: Father Burke (Demian Bichir), a priest and young novitiate Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga). When they reach Romania, they are joined by a local peasant, Frenchie (Jonas Bloquet) – a French-Canadian immigrant who had discovered the body of the dead nun.
To its credit, Corin Hardy’s film has great locations for the task of terrorising: the ruin of an ancient abbey that has also gone through the trauma of falling bombs during war. The decaying structure is suitably eerie, complete with a graveyard next door decorated with hundreds of crosses. There is also a clever use of light to make the shadows and fog build the strain.
But all these atmosphere and mood schemes are quickly abandoned for a shock-horror approach that peddles all the banalities of the genre, often milking them with a loud score to boot.
Both Burke and Irene’s personal histories are seeded in not for character development, but to plant bargain-basement clues and scares in an obvious puzzle.
Horror as a genre is one of the most allegorical of them all. The finest of the pedigree have deep societal fears in them, in the garb of serving a thrill ride. The Nun however, beneath its surface-level jolts, has no clear articulation to deepen its myth.
The writing (Gary Dauberman and James Wan) neither has depth in the narrative like its lensing, nor does it possess the self-awareness to go the whole hog of being camp cool. The priest does emphasise action over prayer, and Bloquet has a few comic-relief punches, but those are too little, too late to sprinkle laughter over the unholy affairs. The film is so burdened with Christian mythology that it almost works overtime to baptise the audience in all sincerity, and the eyes of Farmiga, the younger sister of Conjuring star Vera Farmiga, though seriously devoted, do nothing to break the Christ overkill.
By the time the film nears its climax, you’ve encountered so many nuns, veiled, playing hide and seek, terrorising, and some just dead, you’ve seen more of them than you can handle. And this constant gardening of nuns robs the villain, also a nun, of any frightening presence. All you do is cross your heart, and say the ordeal has come to an end. Oh thank you, Jesus.
(The writer is a journalist, a screenwriter, and a content developer who believes in the insanity of words, in print or otherwise. He tweets @RanjibMazumder).
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