Back in the habit
I would like to start by making it clear that The Nun II is not a good movie. I am giving it a good review anyway, because I am very easy mark for a certain kind of dipshit haunted-house atmosphere, so take that as you will. I would also like to point out that this is almost exactly the same way I started my review of the first The Nun in 2018, so take that as you will, as well.
The Nun II is not as good as The Nun; that much, I think, we can all agree on. This is in part because the makers of The Nun II have decided not to use such a heavy hand with the fog machine, and there is no aggressively old-fashioned Universal horror-style movie-set graveyard with a ground that appears to glow with blue light; for that matter, the makers of The Nun II (and I am here chiefly indicting cinematographer Tristan Nyby, I guess) have gotten a little too excited by the bad habit in 2020s horror of using no light when they had meant to use low light, and there are a few scenes where it's actively hard to clearly make out plot-critical visual details. Fortunately, since The Nun II has a ploddingly literal script (by Ian Goldberg & Richard Naing and Akela Cooper, from a story by Cooper) that spells out everything in dialogue that we need to understand, there is in a sense no such actual thing as "plot-critical visual details", so it's more of an extreme annoyance than a dealbreaker. Also, for every scene where Nyby overplays his hand and makes the thing too dark, there are four or five scenes where he makes it just the right amount of dark, so we see a black space with a somehow blacker-than-black nun-shaped rip in the world coalesce out of the gloom, with the optional addition of topaz-yellow eyes flashing brightly in the place where the thing's head can just barely be made out. It's good and creepy, in the most profoundly obvious way; but then, in this tenth anniversary year of the Conjuring shared universe of movies, I think we have to admit that this franchise hasn't been trying to avoid all of the obvious paths towards being creepy for a very long time. If indeed it ever was; I think the argument to be made is that all Conjuring-verse movies are blunt, obvious, and trite, and the only thing that matters is the answer to the question if any given film is especially successful at executing that in a zesty, generically thrilling way.
For The Nun II, I think the answer is "yes, barely", and I would not have any counterargument for the viewer who instead says that it's "no, but almost" (to the viewer who says "no, absolutely not", I think you're a boring poop). So many films into the larger Conjuring franchise, anyone who has been paying attention to these things - or anyone who has at least seen The Nun, which is pretty much essential viewing for this sequel that just drops us right into the action with only a quick and cursory recap (the first time that any of these films have actually expected the viewer to have considerable working knowledge of a previous film, which is kind of weird now that I think about it) - will know how they stage their jump scares, a particular formula of "wide shot A with negative space behind a character; cut to POV shot B of what they're looking at; back to A; back to B; back to A, now pan right, now pan back lef-OHMIGOD" that isn't at all exclusive to this franchise, though I'm pretty sure it has been employed by literally every film in this franchise since The Conjuring 2 in 2016 (the film where the Nun demon was first teased, in fact). It is, here in the year 2023, very lazy of the films to keep using this jump scare. But lazy is not a synonym of ineffective, and I will admit to very thoroughly enjoying the one jump scare all of the approximately 350 times it was deployed by director Michael Chaves throughout the movie. And you know what, let's have a round of applause for Mr. Chaves, I mean this without irony. I don't think he's doing very much to help The Nun II become its best self; he's certainly not on the lookout for ways to reduce its 110-minute running time by any serious amount. He really can only think of the one way to stage a scare, though he is helped that the effects team has picked a very ominous and hostile and inhuman shade of yellow for the Nun's flashing eyes piercing their way through the dark, so it somehow keeps managing to be creepy no matter how many times it shows up (it is many times). The thing is, he really is tackling The Nun II with great enthusiasm, and if he can only play that one trick, well by golly he is playing it with a grin on his face and a song in his heart. And, this is the genuinely praiseworthy part, he is getting better with every movie. His feature debut was the utterly dismal The Curse of La Llorona, and his second feature was the merely ineffective The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, and now he's actually landed on a film that's, y'know, fine. This is a director targeting his weaknesses and trying to improve on them, and also this is a director who obviously cares a lot about this franchise and is happy to be a part of it.
Anyway, what does The Nun II have to offer, beyond very dark scenes of a hell-black wimple rising from the gloom, and a non-stop pile-up of functionally identical jump scares? ...well, what else does it need, is my initial response. The story is about as much "it's a sequel, do the same thing again" as it gets: in 1956, four years after she was part of a team that shut down the unfathomable evil of Valak the Nun-Demon (Bonnie Aarons), the brave Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga) is called upon, due to her experience, to... serve as part of a team working to stop Valak. The biggest shift is that that the character of Maurice or "Frenchie" (Jonas Bloquet), who served as one of the assistant good guys last time, is now potentially a bad guy; it seems Valak planted itself deep inside of him, and is now using him to try to break into the world, this time at a boarding school in France that used to be a cloister. Irene and the novice Debra (Storm Reid) are dispatched to investigate, and they find many, many dark rooms, as well as one less-dark room with a stained-glass goat whose eye glows blood-red at the right time of the afternoon, which is certainly a curious thing to put in a cloister, but it results in some of the film's most striking, nervy images, so I see very little reason to disallow it. The Nun II absolutely does not claim that its storytelling integrity is more important to it than providing a nice, rickety old thrill ride of bumps and shocks, and in that regard it has some very good goat material, stained glass and otherwise.
All that being said, the film does have a secret weapon, and I am delighted to report that it's a Farmiga: Taissa has picked up big sister Vera's knack for being just so weirdly better than she has any need to be. The Nun II is silly, cheerful autumn-flavored schlock. It puts no real effort into being anything else. And yet Farmiga is standing in the middle of all the corny Halloween-decore theatrics, giving an earnest, tough performance of faith in God being assaulted but not weakened, while faith in humanity gets a bit more complicated and unsettled. It's not great acting, but it provides a solid note of human honesty right there in the dead center of the movie, laying out an impression of Sister Irene as someone who has grown in fortitude and wisdom since the first movie, and for more reasons than we're explicitly given reference to. It's not at all something that The Nun II was asking for, but it's to the film's great benefit that it showed up anyway.
Reviews in this series
The Conjuring (Wan, 2013)
Annabelle (Leonetti, 2014)
The Conjuring 2 (Wan, 2016)
Annabelle: Creation (Sandberg, 2017)
The Nun (Hardy, 2018)
The Curse of La Llorona (Chaves, 2019)
Annabelle Comes Home (Dauberman, 2019)
The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (Chaves, 2021)
The Nun II (Chaves, 2023)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
The Nun II is not as good as The Nun; that much, I think, we can all agree on. This is in part because the makers of The Nun II have decided not to use such a heavy hand with the fog machine, and there is no aggressively old-fashioned Universal horror-style movie-set graveyard with a ground that appears to glow with blue light; for that matter, the makers of The Nun II (and I am here chiefly indicting cinematographer Tristan Nyby, I guess) have gotten a little too excited by the bad habit in 2020s horror of using no light when they had meant to use low light, and there are a few scenes where it's actively hard to clearly make out plot-critical visual details. Fortunately, since The Nun II has a ploddingly literal script (by Ian Goldberg & Richard Naing and Akela Cooper, from a story by Cooper) that spells out everything in dialogue that we need to understand, there is in a sense no such actual thing as "plot-critical visual details", so it's more of an extreme annoyance than a dealbreaker. Also, for every scene where Nyby overplays his hand and makes the thing too dark, there are four or five scenes where he makes it just the right amount of dark, so we see a black space with a somehow blacker-than-black nun-shaped rip in the world coalesce out of the gloom, with the optional addition of topaz-yellow eyes flashing brightly in the place where the thing's head can just barely be made out. It's good and creepy, in the most profoundly obvious way; but then, in this tenth anniversary year of the Conjuring shared universe of movies, I think we have to admit that this franchise hasn't been trying to avoid all of the obvious paths towards being creepy for a very long time. If indeed it ever was; I think the argument to be made is that all Conjuring-verse movies are blunt, obvious, and trite, and the only thing that matters is the answer to the question if any given film is especially successful at executing that in a zesty, generically thrilling way.
For The Nun II, I think the answer is "yes, barely", and I would not have any counterargument for the viewer who instead says that it's "no, but almost" (to the viewer who says "no, absolutely not", I think you're a boring poop). So many films into the larger Conjuring franchise, anyone who has been paying attention to these things - or anyone who has at least seen The Nun, which is pretty much essential viewing for this sequel that just drops us right into the action with only a quick and cursory recap (the first time that any of these films have actually expected the viewer to have considerable working knowledge of a previous film, which is kind of weird now that I think about it) - will know how they stage their jump scares, a particular formula of "wide shot A with negative space behind a character; cut to POV shot B of what they're looking at; back to A; back to B; back to A, now pan right, now pan back lef-OHMIGOD" that isn't at all exclusive to this franchise, though I'm pretty sure it has been employed by literally every film in this franchise since The Conjuring 2 in 2016 (the film where the Nun demon was first teased, in fact). It is, here in the year 2023, very lazy of the films to keep using this jump scare. But lazy is not a synonym of ineffective, and I will admit to very thoroughly enjoying the one jump scare all of the approximately 350 times it was deployed by director Michael Chaves throughout the movie. And you know what, let's have a round of applause for Mr. Chaves, I mean this without irony. I don't think he's doing very much to help The Nun II become its best self; he's certainly not on the lookout for ways to reduce its 110-minute running time by any serious amount. He really can only think of the one way to stage a scare, though he is helped that the effects team has picked a very ominous and hostile and inhuman shade of yellow for the Nun's flashing eyes piercing their way through the dark, so it somehow keeps managing to be creepy no matter how many times it shows up (it is many times). The thing is, he really is tackling The Nun II with great enthusiasm, and if he can only play that one trick, well by golly he is playing it with a grin on his face and a song in his heart. And, this is the genuinely praiseworthy part, he is getting better with every movie. His feature debut was the utterly dismal The Curse of La Llorona, and his second feature was the merely ineffective The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, and now he's actually landed on a film that's, y'know, fine. This is a director targeting his weaknesses and trying to improve on them, and also this is a director who obviously cares a lot about this franchise and is happy to be a part of it.
Anyway, what does The Nun II have to offer, beyond very dark scenes of a hell-black wimple rising from the gloom, and a non-stop pile-up of functionally identical jump scares? ...well, what else does it need, is my initial response. The story is about as much "it's a sequel, do the same thing again" as it gets: in 1956, four years after she was part of a team that shut down the unfathomable evil of Valak the Nun-Demon (Bonnie Aarons), the brave Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga) is called upon, due to her experience, to... serve as part of a team working to stop Valak. The biggest shift is that that the character of Maurice or "Frenchie" (Jonas Bloquet), who served as one of the assistant good guys last time, is now potentially a bad guy; it seems Valak planted itself deep inside of him, and is now using him to try to break into the world, this time at a boarding school in France that used to be a cloister. Irene and the novice Debra (Storm Reid) are dispatched to investigate, and they find many, many dark rooms, as well as one less-dark room with a stained-glass goat whose eye glows blood-red at the right time of the afternoon, which is certainly a curious thing to put in a cloister, but it results in some of the film's most striking, nervy images, so I see very little reason to disallow it. The Nun II absolutely does not claim that its storytelling integrity is more important to it than providing a nice, rickety old thrill ride of bumps and shocks, and in that regard it has some very good goat material, stained glass and otherwise.
All that being said, the film does have a secret weapon, and I am delighted to report that it's a Farmiga: Taissa has picked up big sister Vera's knack for being just so weirdly better than she has any need to be. The Nun II is silly, cheerful autumn-flavored schlock. It puts no real effort into being anything else. And yet Farmiga is standing in the middle of all the corny Halloween-decore theatrics, giving an earnest, tough performance of faith in God being assaulted but not weakened, while faith in humanity gets a bit more complicated and unsettled. It's not great acting, but it provides a solid note of human honesty right there in the dead center of the movie, laying out an impression of Sister Irene as someone who has grown in fortitude and wisdom since the first movie, and for more reasons than we're explicitly given reference to. It's not at all something that The Nun II was asking for, but it's to the film's great benefit that it showed up anyway.
Reviews in this series
The Conjuring (Wan, 2013)
Annabelle (Leonetti, 2014)
The Conjuring 2 (Wan, 2016)
Annabelle: Creation (Sandberg, 2017)
The Nun (Hardy, 2018)
The Curse of La Llorona (Chaves, 2019)
Annabelle Comes Home (Dauberman, 2019)
The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (Chaves, 2021)
The Nun II (Chaves, 2023)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
Categories: horror, scary ghosties, spooky old buildings, worthy sequels
