A Freira

Was there a plot? Nun Were there any scares? Nun Any good acting? Nun Any reason to go see this movie? Nun

Starts out mysterious and creepy and concludes with a nifty, direct connection with the first Conjuring movie. Sadly, along the way, the writers give into horror cliches and undermine what could have been an above average prequel: people needlessly separating from each other to wander alone down dark, evil passages; a heroine who screams approximately seven times too often; and, that desperate refuge of weak horror scripts, zombified corpse ghost revanent demon things. Writing this to get to the required 600. How long did it take a committee to come up with that random number? Okay I need four more, there that did it.

If you had told me five years ago that one of my most anticipated movies of 2018 would be titled 'The Nun' I would've been very surprised. It was though. I had been looking forward to this movie ever since it was announced. I'm a huge fan of both of 'The Conjuring' movies, but have admittedly not loved either of the two 'Annabelle' spin-offs. I was very pleased to see James Wan was attached to the writing side of things on this one though and so held out high hopes for it. Sadly though, I have to report this is another complete misfire.

Starting with the positives though - the movie looks great. The set decoration is truly terrific in nearly every scene and the building and surrounding area that the film is set in were ideally selected. The groundwork was there for this to be a very creepy movie. At times the movie does work too, but that is mainly when it is being subtle. There are a lot of scenes where images of 'The Nun' are sort of there, but also sort of not. You question yourself whether you are actually seeing what you think you are. I really liked that side of things. Too often though the film is far too in your face. The demon will jump out of a tree and scream into a character's face (a very lion-like and un-scary scream I would have to say as well).

The dialogue in this film is a real mess too, which surprised me considering Wan's involvement. The character of 'Frenchie' is particularly painful. He is meant to be the comic relief, but nothing he says is in any way funny, and is frankly a little embarrassing in parts. Also some of the things the demon says like, "The village will be missing its idiot tomorrow" (or something to that effect), are cringe-worthy and should never have made the final cut.

I was very let down by this film. There are a lot of jump-scares, and not one of them gave me the slightest jolt. My heart-rate never rose above resting in any scene and I was frankly bored for the most part. The only saving graces were that the film looked great, connected in with the rest of the series well and had a truly great final scene that left me a little blown away. I didn't want this to have to be a negative review, but there was no other way to go about it.

I've seen a few stinkers of horrors that certainly deserve 1 or 2 starts, but come on, The Nun deserves better than that. Sure it doesn't have the finesse of The Conjuring films, the plot is a little thin and the scares do rely quite heavily on the tried and tested loud jump scares, but:

It has great camera work Very good set pieces and great atmosphere Good acting Great effects And it does make you jump outta your seat

If you bear all of that in mind and are not expecting anything else, then you'll have a great time.

It seems like, in The Conjuring 2, the writers just thought: "a monster in a nun costume - that seems really cool!" Then, when they try to build a story around it, they can't get the square peg to fit in the round hole. It's a nun monastery in Romania. And a demon called Valak. But why is he running around in a nun costume? That story doesn't get developed enough. A good ghost story always have a mystique and history, but this movie doesn't deliver in that aspect. Instead they seem just to rely on jump scares and cheap thrills.