‘The Nun II’ Review: Habit-Forming Ghoul Returns in a Diverting Sequel
07.09.2023 - 17:03
/ variety.com
Dennis Harvey Film Critic Now on its ninth feature entry in just a decade, the “Conjuring” franchise has proved something of a powerhouse in the continued growth of horror as one of the most reliably popular (not to mention cost-effective) mainstream film genres. Their mythologies may be garbled and silly, the scares mostly “jump” ones, yet these movies provide a kind of creepy comfort food — familiarly formulaic jolts unlikely to trouble any non-child viewer’s sleep later on — whose satisfactions are amplified by the good actors and superior atmospherics deployed.
Defying the law of diminishing returns, 2018’s spinoff “The Nun” was (and so far remains) the franchise’s biggest hit to date. Ergo enter “The Nun II,” a direct sequel.
In some respects an improvement on its predecessor, in others not, this is finally one more good-enough if unmemorable entry sure to extend the series’ life in lucrative fashion. Storywise, the prior “Nun” entry (whose titular figure got introduced in 2016’s “Conjuring 2”) was cluttered and near-nonsensical, little more than a string of “boo!” incidents sending novitiate Taissa Farmiga and Vatican priest Demian Bichir a-hunting demons in Cold War-era Romania.
But Corin Hardy’s film was a spooky treat in purely visual terms, with rich, ornate old-school Gothic atmospherics (swirling fog, refracted light et al.) as if shot by 1960s Mario Bava, or on the 1940s Universal backlot. Part Deux is less distinctive in that department.
But it’s got a somewhat stronger narrative framework — even if that structure keeps Farmiga’s ostensible protagonist somewhat sidelined from the main strand for a ponderously long time. After an opening sequence in which a malevolent spirit frightens an altar boy (Maxime
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