All meat, no muscles - 6/10

by Mohamad Khatib

   Extending and expanding the “The Conjuring” universe, “The Nun” arrives as a spin-off revolving around this universe’s most evil character, unleashing its own taste of hell on a priest, a nun to-be and a… womanizer. The story simply unfolds as a priest is sent to Romania to investigate the suicide of a nun in a monastery, accompanied and aided by a young lady about to become a nun herself. Written and story by Gary Dauberman (It, Annabelle, Annabelle: Creation), and Director, Producer and Writer James Wan (Insidious 1 and 2, The Conjuring 1 and 2), this movie definitely deserved a better tale and script for this one is all meat and not much muscle. It is a continuous, monotonous and repetitive string of the creepiest, ugliest, and scariest, most beautifully shot and edited scenes, all for one sole purpose, to pleasure our horror-thirsty visual and audible senses but without much backstory or dramatic content to support it.

   Standing at 1 hour and 40 minutes, I could not help but feel the characterization and dramatic plot was rather thin and rushed, it was a good idea to have a guilty-filled priest, a future nun who has some kind of divine visions guiding her onto the Lord’s righteous path, and a French man who thinks with his lower organ, but their backstories come off as shallow, for example, I did not really buy the emotional weight presented by the priest as he tells us about some past mistake that caused somebody’s death, we only see the so-called evil presence using it as a tool to scare the audience, add to that his cowardice approach to facing death lying in a locked coffin, screaming for help without as much as a prayer or a strong show of faith, could that have been an indirect religious parody? Perhaps. As for our female protagonist, there is no clear purpose of having her character be one who is about to become a nun, she did not seem at any point unsure of her decision to join the church if we are to believe that what we have in front us are flawed weak human beings, being exploited and abused by the devil for his own agenda and lastly all Maurice - more popularly known in the plot as Frenchy - did was hit on our lady nun, run away scared shitless, only to come back in the end to save the day. Come to think of it, those are not weak-faithed characters, but poorly and comically written ones. Furthermore, the concept of evil is oversimplified to the point of being trivial in making it confined to one space, in this case below a gate, which has one key to keep it locked for the sake of mankind.

  On a more controversial note, explicitly there was no insult or blasphemy towards the Christian religion and its institutions; Hollywood is overfilled with movies dealing with evil and horror occurring in churches and sacred places, this movie was not the first and surely will not be the last. I respect and understand the idea of having a monastery or place of Christian worship being haunted might not sit right with the Christian community but we have to keep an open mind that this story never suggests at any moment that Christianity is evil, on the contrary, it states that evil could be anywhere and could strike at any time, the believers and non-believers and in the end of the movie the good of Christ and his blood triumphed over evil and destroyed it. Implicitly and ‘watching’ between the lines, so to speak, having a coward priest, a girl obliged by her visions to choose the way of God, and a French flirt sent to a deserted land where no other human being is seen or any real community, to investigate a suicide in an old, black and grey potentially haunted monastery, shows that the Hollywood producers and writers behind this do not really hold religion in general and Christianity specially in a good and healthy eye. As if they are saying religion has become an old, out-dated, deserted thing of the past, a place suspect of genuine holiness, where nobody wants to and should ever visit.

  All in all the striking visuals - helmed by Director Corin Hardy with only “The Hallows” under his belt- and harsh sound effects did well to compensate for the poor story and pick this film up to be a good horrific treat.

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