"The Abbey Has A Long History. Not All Good..."
Presenting itself as the fifth entry in the surprisingly successful The Conjuring franchise which began in 2013 with James Wan's ferociously entertaining opening chapter, The Nun, directed by British filmmaker, Corin Hardy, takes the franchise back even further into the past as we see Taissa Farmiga's (American Horror Story) Sister Irene venture into Romania circa 1952 alongside Demián Bichir's (The Hateful Eight) Father Burke in order to investigate the recent suicide of a nun from the local abbey. With an abundance of torrid genre conventions and cliches, laughable special effects and a tiresome reliance on boring, repetitive jump scares, Hardy's addition to The Conjuring franchise is undoubtedly the weakest entry yet, a movie which fails to ignite the interest which its' predecessors carried in spades thanks to a complete ignorance of movie-making fundamentals including a paper thin plot and borderline insulting levels of characterisation which results in The Nun being a painful and overly ridiculous supernatural horror which jerks at the chance to create something special with what is undoubtedly a horrifying and spooky titular character.
With Hardy's only previous cinematic endeavour so far being 2015's The Hallow, a trashy, supernatural horror B-movie, its' no real surprise that The Nun covers similar ground, with an over-inflated mist budget and creepy religious landmarks setting the stage up with open arms for a movie which you are praying (no pun intended) makes the most of its' many fundamentally spooky elements. Unfortunately, with an utterly dire script by horror aficionado Gary Dauberman (It) where plot is overshadowed by dour set pieces in which scares are few and even jump-scares are awfully timed, Hardy fails to grab the attention of even the most lenient of horror audiences, and with the added impotence of some overly hokey performances by the likes of Jonas Bloquet (Elle) as "Frenchie" a try-hard, mopey local who deserves to die the moment the audience lays eyes on him, The Nun becomes more of a laugh out loud comedy as it claws its' way towards a finish line which crow-bars its' very faint relation to the wider The Conjuring universe. With Taissa Farmiga following in the footsteps of her sister (The Conjuring's Vera Farmiga) by undoubtedly being the best part of the film, The Nun isn't entirely woeful, it's just a movie in which its' trailer is a much scarier and tighter work of horror than the full feature.
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