‘The Nun II’: Review

Dir: Michael Chaves. US. 2023. 110mins

Anyone praying that this horror sequel would be an improvement on the 2018 original is in for a disappointment. Taissa Farmiga returns as Sister Irene, sent to do battle with the demon who almost killed her four years previously, but finds herself in a convoluted, lacklustre retread of The Nun, only with even more ludicrous plotting and severely diminished scare returns.

Attempts to force the fear through endless jump scares and bombastic music

Despite a muted critical reception, The Nun is the highest grossing entry in the sprawling The Conjuring universe, taking a global box office total of over $365m (the franchise as a whole has earned $2.1bn to date). Warner Bros will be hoping this sequel heads for those heights when it releases globally on September 6, going up against another sequel, My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3, in key territories. Horror fans are likely to show up in their droves, although the performance of the two most recent films in the series — 2019’s Annabelle Comes Home ($231m) and 2021’s The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do ($123m) — may seem to suggest that the appetite for this 20-year-old franchise is on the wane.

Michael Chaves replaces Corin Hardy behind the lens for this second iteration. He has directed two previous instalments in the nine-film (to date) Conjuring universe: standalone story The Curse Of La Llorona (2019) and The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (2021). (The franchise also includes three Annabelle films, about the titular possessed doll.) All of these films — set between 1952 and 1982 — supposedly intersect, their sprawling narrative web centred on Seventies paranormal investigators Ed (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine Warren (Vera Farmiga), who first appeared in 2013’s The Conjuring. (This film’s Demon Nun first appeared in 2016’s The Conjuring 2.)  Yet The Nun II screenwriters Ian Goldberg, Richard Naing and Akela Cooper do not demand wider knowledge from their audience, neither do they assume familiarity with the first Nun film; in fact, it may help if you haven’t seen it, otherwise deja vu fatigue will set in early.

The casting of Taissa Farmiga, sister of Vera, suggests a link between the characters of Irene and Lorraine Warren, with fans speculating that they may be the same person, although they remain unconnected for now. Having banished (or so she believed) the demon nun Valak from Romania’s Santa Cartha monastery four years previously, Irene is shocked to be informed ‘by Rome’ that Valak survived, and is making his way across Europe. With Irene’s former demon slaying partner Father Burke (Demian Bichir) having sadly “died from cholera”, she is now joined by Sister Debra (Storm Reid in a woefully underwritten role), and the pair eventually track the activity to a monastery-turned-girls boarding school in rural France. Here, Irene encounters Maurice (Jonas Bloquet) — the man who saved her life in the first film, but who is now possessed by Valak.

Valak is still after total world domination and, this time, requires an ancient relic to fully realise his power. While he waits for it to be found, he engages in a series of cheap parlour tricks — repeatedly appearing as the now-familiar towering, white-faced, sharp-toothed nun (Bonnie Aarons). It is unclear as to why such a powerful shapeshifting demon has clung onto its nun costume, which made a sort-of sense in the first film’s abbess setting but seems redundant and — aside from one well-executed sequence involving a magazine stand in a deserted French alleyway —  far less impactful here.

Logic, though, is not at the forefront of The Nun II which, like its predecessor, attempts to force the fear through endless jump scares and bombastic music rather than take time to build any real tension. Minor-key subplots involving how Sister Irene’s maternal lineage — detailed in brief soft focus flashbacks to her childhood — may mark her out for a certain kind of divinity, and one involving Sister Debra’s lack of faith, seem grafted on, perhaps in an attempt to bring substance. In fact, the main horror here is that, with 15 years of time to kill between the end of this film and the beginning of The Conjuring 2, set in 1977, there may be more of these chapters yet to come.