The Nun (2018)

August 1, 2023 9:39 AM

When a young nun at a cloistered abbey in Romania takes her own life, a priest with a haunted past (Demián Bichir) and a novitiate on the threshold of her final vows (Taissa Farmiga) are sent by the Vatican to investigate. Together they uncover the order's unholy secret. Risking not only their lives but their faith and their very souls, they confront a malevolent force in the form of the same demonic nun that first terrorized audiences in The Conjuring 2 as the abbey becomes a horrific battleground between the living and the damned.

Directed by Corin Hardy, from a screenplay by Gary Dauberman, James Wan.

25% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes.

Currently streaming in the US on Max. JustWatch.

posted by DirtyOldTown (4 comments total)

Kiddo wanted to see this before the sequel comes out. I went in with very, very low expectations and it managed to be just decent enough to clear those.

Nothing that happens in this movie is particularly surprising or fresh, but the production design is professional, the locations are cool (Hello Castle Corvin in Hunedoara! I know it well), and the actors aren't slouches. If you're into The Conjuring series and would like some jump scares, you could do worse, I guess.

Minimally and sufficiently competent all around, if you want to damn with faint praise.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:41 AM on August 1, 2023

Shepherd and I have watched this. I remember some of our observations were: Frenchie is NOT French Canadian, and his accent drove Shepherd up the wall ("He's clearly French-French or Belgian! That is NOT a Quebecois accent!") and that it seems that to become a successful nun, you must lie face down, ass up (this has led to us chanting "Face down/ass up/That's the way you become a nun" in Euro-disco style club beats), and that cursed nunnery really does have a suspiciously large pool of water in the cellar.
posted by Kitteh at 11:27 AM on August 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

Yep, he's Belgian. If it makes you feel any better, at least he has a French accent, as opposed to all of the Romanian characters who don't even vaguely sound Romanian, even to the point of pronouncing the name of recurring character "Oana" (should more or less sound like "Juana) to rhyme with "Moana."
posted by DirtyOldTown at 11:58 AM on August 2, 2023

(If you want to be pedantic, Ingrid Bisu and Maria Obretin, who play nuns in the convent, are both actually Romanian, but even they seem to have been directed to use as little of their accents as possible.)
posted by DirtyOldTown at 12:12 PM on August 2, 2023