A prequel to the box office hit “The Conjuring 2,” Corin Hardy’s “The Nun” takes viewers through 96 minutes of cheap jump scares and is ultimately unsuccessful in its attempt to keep audiences on the edge of their seat.
Set in the 1950s, “The Nun” follows soon-to-be nun Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga) and Father Burke (Demián Bichir) as they investigate a suicide in a Romanian abbey. Yet when they arrive, they realize that the suicide barely scratches the surface of the abbey’s troubles.
While the basic premise of the movie seems unsettling, the movie fails to truly horrify the audience and instead only temporarily leaves viewers disturbed through gore and jump scares.
The movie relies chiefly on cliché camera moves that depics a dark and mysterious figure looming behind a character. There is no suspense or tension, only lazy attempts to scare the audience. It felt like Hardy’s approach to horror was mixing fog with loud noises and gory images to try to evoke fear in audiences. Unfortunately for Hardy, it didn’t work.
“The Nun” also lacks an obscene amount of pacing. In order to keep audiences on their toes, movies such as “The Conjuring” and “The Conjuring 2” allow suspense to build while giving periods of relaxation. “The Nun” ignores this pacing that added to the success of its predecessors.
The movie is dark, and it stays dark for its entire duration. There is never a calm period that allows the audience to relax. Instead the viewer slowly adapts to the eerie woods of Romania. It gets to a point where no one cares that it's dark and scary anymore.
That’s the major issue with “The Nun” — it fails to make the viewer care. The plot is predictable and moves slowly. There are no elements that contribute to a complex plot line. Instead, the movie follows as so: Scary stuff happens, protagonists investigate the aforementioned scary stuff, scary stuff happens again and the protagonists manage to save the day.
Another element that makes “The Nun” unpleasant is the lack of character development. The movie fails to produce any kind of backstory for the characters that it introduces, with only Farmiga’s character briefly alluding to an interesting past. However, Hardy’s failure to delve deeper into this results in disinterest from an audience unable to connect with and find a reason to care about the protagonists. The interactions between the characters are also extremely stale and don’t lead to any relationships being built. Throughout the course of the movie, the characters never change and instead remain boring and stagnant.
The lack of character development coupled with the lack of plot makes “The Nun” excruciatingly boring to watch. “The Nun” doesn’t feel like a well-constructed horror movie like its predecessors. Instead, it feels like a lazy attempt to make money off of an already critically acclaimed and established franchise.