2/10 I walk into The Nun II bored with myself and wanting deliberately to take this movie more seriously than it deserves. The idea behind this nun character is that the image is the scary thing, that merely a nun who looks scary is a perverse enough and a strange enough thing to pose questions to a person’s faith. Clearly, this is not a series for people who went to Catholic school. But! Film is a visual medium, the image is the important thing, so in theory, this could be a solid basis for a movie.

That’s as far as this effort is going to go, because “in theory” is the only way The Nun II could be considered a decent movie.

Tarascon, France, 1956- Four years after The Nun, the demon Valak (Bonnie Aarons) has tracked across southern Europe from Transylvania, killing as he goes, moving toward a boarding school in Tarascon built on an old monastery. A bunch of not-scary horror movie stuff happens for about an hour and a half.

The Nun II still carries the “true story” selling point, and it’s worth remembering right off what that actually means. It’s a spinoff from the Conjuring series, based on the accounts of known frauds Ed and Lorraine Warren, all carrying the “true story” selling point. They’re all extremely slow, visually bland, cheap, short creature features where the “creature” is a dude in makeup. In The Conjuring 2, they added an admittedly fictional part where Lorraine has visions of a demon dressed up as a nun so they could have another dude in makeup in the movie, and the Nun movies are backstory for this makeup concept.

So, The Nun II is the sequel to a spinoff laying out the backstory of a completely fictionalized makeup concept in a movie based on the “case files” of, again, known frauds. That’s what “based on a true story” means in this instance. This is not a disqualification, a movie with this background could still have been great, but understanding who the target audience is and how they’re being targeted helps contexualize why it is so bad.  

The Nun II is exactly what I should have been expecting. It’s more of the same jump-scare crap, the complete silence for minutes at a time before every scare followed by sensory overload. Both Nun movies seem to be trying to up the ante by staying silent for longer, making themselves more boring as they lean into this poor understanding of how to create tension in film.

The story passes in one ear and right out the other like a hissed fart – this isn’t just because the characters are boring, it’s structural. The only character working toward tangible goals is Valak, and he only ever comes on screen to say “boo” every 20 minutes or so.

The characters are also very boring. The gang’s all here – the nun, of course, the surviving characters I don’t care about or even remember, a whole gaggle of mostly indistinguishable new characters to waste, and some new dudes in makeup for spinoff material. For a secondary antagonist, The Nun II introduces a goat that is also Satan, so just a less scary Black Phillip from The Witch. Unfortunately, The Witch made $40.4 million worldwide and The Nun II made $69.5 million worldwide on just its opening weekend, so everybody get ready for The Goat, coming to theaters near you next Halloween at the latest.

I wrote that as a god damn joke, but they’re actually trying to drum up an audience for The Goat.

I’m so bored. I can barely pay attention. It feels like the scares are scattered by algorithm – every time I say “I’m bored” to myself, the film falls completely silent again, another breath-hold before a sudden series of bangs as characters I couldn’t pick out of a line-up are vaguely menaced. I want to say the lack of peril is what’s doing it, the consistent problem in lightweight horror movies where the danger never seems real because no one is hurt, but I’m just as bored in the climax when it finally seems possible.

It’s just a really low-quality movie. Even the dramatic “no” at the end seems half-hearted.

There’s a noticeable throughline of victim blaming, always focusing on what haunting victims do to invite Valak’s attention. The haunting starts with a young boy kicking a soccer ball back and fourth with a dark hallway, and we see girls at the boarding school bringing in roaches for study, which the demon will later use as his heralds. It matches up with baseline messaging about how evil must be invited in, but doesn’t make any sense in this particular story about a demon who’s been shown to be quite industrious. 

What’s missing? What would have made this movie good for a laugh, at least? Because The Nun II isn’t good for a laugh. The actors are all taking this seriously, and the performances aren’t wild enough to be turned into fun. The monster costumes are intricate and fun enough to look at, silly concepts executed too earnestly – I have no end of scorn for the person who thought a goat was a good idea, but I don’t have any for the people who put the goat together and hoped I’d be amused by it. They did decent work. The Nun II appears to be a genuine effort by all involved, and there is plenty to appreciate.

I feel like I need to give more credit for the type of high-contrast compositions I usually love. Photography director Tristan Nyby uses lighting quite aggressively to create the movie’s scares. Valak or whichever of the other ones are often lurking barely visible in the frame, or his shape will suddenly form as a pop-out. Characters in various Catholic outfits are backlit in many scenes, their faces barely visible, making them look similar to the spooky nun.

We see Valak traveling through paintings, through stains in the wall and, in one major set piece, through fashion magazines, using the image of women more broadly and not just the image of a nun. A demon who uses the image of women, drawing out the effect their image can have on the psyche to prey on people, is another potent idea for a horror movie, essentially what I’d primed myself to hope for coming in. The psychological concepts for a good film are latent here in The Nun movies ready for me to tease them out and imagine how much better the films could be, but obviously the real-world fears surrounding sex and motherhood such a film would need to explore are far too real and lurid for a Conjuring movie to explore.

As they’ve progressed, Conjuring movies have become a halfway point between mainstream film and the Pureflix-style astroturfing that we’ve seen in other parts of the market, catering to the same Christian paranoia while putting more effort into disguising itself as a real movie. This is just a case of demographic overlap – Conjuring and God’s Not Dead viewers are both more likely to be Christian – but also the basic facts about that demographic.

American Christians generally take Christianity seriously as a concept, but they don’t really read the Bible or understand a lot of the specifics, and so the goop of Catholic-themed nonsense presented in the Conjuring films are presented with the utmost seriousness. The paranoia of contemporary American Christianity and constant search for a new villain is almost satirized by the films’ constantly introducing new secondary bad guys and trying to spin them off into their own series.

The most basic truth is that the “based on a true story” line is still a net positive for the audience they’re going after. Ed and Lorraine Warren were transparently con artists when they were active, no different from any other “ghost hunter” you’d flip past on the daytime History Channel, but because they couched themselves in religion and tapped into that magical thinking, they found an audience. One that Warner Bros. has been monetizing for 10 years now.

Leopold Knopp is a UNT graduate. If you liked this post, you can donate to Reel Entropy here. Like Reel Entropy on Facebook and reach out to me at reelentropy@gmail.com.