Rate THE NUN (2018)

So I had a few hours to kill and was near a movie theater, so I popped in out of the rain and saw this.

And I really liked it, which I hadn’t expected at all (and which seems not to follow the tenor of the comments here, I see).

With modern movies like this, it’s really best to savor the experience, not to descend into analytics—I just had a fun time seeing it in a theater, and I like the way it felt and was made and came off. In particular, it was absolutely dripping with atmosphere, and there are shots that recall both the Universal and the Hammer horrors (I think you’d like it, Primemovermithrax Pejorative).

One should keep in mind, though, that I’m an absolute wimp when it comes to horror (which is, again, why I was not expecting to like this—and why I shocked myself by buying a ticket for it—but I had heard it wasn’t too scary) and that I’ve not seen any of the previous movies in the series. (Luckily, it could stand alone.) I thought it was scary, very scary, but never enough that I wanted to leave the theater. It was exactly at the right level for me, at least—Hallowe’en-haunted-house scary, if that makes sense.

It had the modern requisite number of jump scares, but it proceeded more on mood than anything else, at least for the first 3/4, which I far prefer to the tedium of masked lunatics waving chainsaws or the revulsion of guts and gore. It does have some effective set-pieces to which it builds using that mood, including a clever and scary one using a graveyard of plague victims. The movie is most definitely not twist-based, à la The Sixth Sense or something, but there’s a nice small twist about 3/4 of the way in that I didn’t see coming.

I’m not exactly sure how to comment on the acting, to be honest, which seemed to fluctuate from scene to scene. I’m delighted, though, that the cast aren’t big stars, which would have completely ruined the illusion. “Frenchie” (Jonas Bloquet), in particular, is a lot of fun, and Taissa Farmiga’s wide-eyed and charming novitiate is instantly appealing. I could never get a handle on where Fr. Burke (Demián Bichir) was supposed to come from, as he’s got an Irish name and sounds French (and the actor is actually Mexican!), but he’s good too. I’m not sure if it’s the screenwriter or the actors who are responsible for this, but despite getting hardly any background detail on these characters, I felt that I knew and liked them all by the end.

Are there problems with the script? Oh, absolutely. Some of the dialogue is hokey (and not in a good way). Sometimes Frenchie’s comic relief ruins the mood. The background story and terribly clichéd “retrieve a magical relic” plot come out of nowhere and partly diminishes the impact of the spooky stuff, and the plot is exactly what you’d expect, played as you’d expect. Yes (though even then there are some nice twists on the formula—I love the way the Nun’s defeated in the end). But it’s so well-done, such a triumph of craft, that I just got sucked into the story, all atmosphere and mood and ruined Romanian abbeys, that I just found myself enjoying nearly every minute of it. Thumbs-up from me.