- Directed by Michael Chaves
- Written by Ian Goldberg, Richard Naing, Akela Cooper
- Stars Taissa Farmiga, Jonas Bloquet, Storm Reid, Anna Popplewell
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 50 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QF-oyCwaArU
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
The two surviving main characters are back, and as the title hints, the demon nun wasn’t as obliterated as they thought. It’s very consistent in look and feel with the first one. The cast and effects are all very good. If you liked or disliked the first one, you will almost certainly feel the same this time around.
Synopsis
In 1956 France, a boy helps the priest with services and does various things. There’s a dark closet in the basement, and there’s something evil inside. The boy gets the priest, and they investigate. When the holy water starts boiling, they know there’s trouble. Things go very badly for the priest after that, as “The Nun” arrives. Credits roll.
Elsewhere, Sister Irene deals with day-to-day issues at the convent. Sister Debra refuses to confess; there’s nothing to confess. There’s a story going around about a demon who lived under an abbey and looked like one of them. The Vatican sent in a pair of demon hunters who used an ancient relic to defeat the demon. Sister Irene listens quietly, knowing that she was there in the first film.
We cut to Sophie, who talks to Maurice, the caretaker at the school. He was known as Frenchie in the first film. A girl delivers food to the school and runs into the nun, who kills her. Sister Irene dreams of Maurice, who turns into a fanged monster, before she wakes up. The next day, she’s visited by a bishop, who tells her about a bunch of weird stuff that’s been going on in a moving pattern. They think the demon is continuing its rampage; Father Burke, from the previous film, has died of cholera, and they want her to investigate. Debra hops on the train to assist her friend, but she doubts her own faith.
Back at the school, Maurice fixes a cabinet for Kate, a teacher he’s sweet on. Sophie is being bullied by the three mean girls in school. They take her to an abandoned area of the school and play “Defy the devil,” something they made up to scare her when they lock her inside. Except there really may be something strange in there with her. She gets out when Maurice opens the door for her.
Irene and Debra go to the church from the pre-credit sequence and look at the outline of where the priest burned up. Irene immediately starts seeing strange things. We get a flashback to Irene and Maurice, her colleague in the first film; he said he was moving to Hungary, and that’s where all the trouble is happening now. Could the problem be following him? She figures out that he’s possessed.
Sophie runs into the nun once again, but it doesn’t do anything. Irene talks to Jacques, the little boy who watched the priest burn. She chases the boy to the newsstand from Hell, where a bunch of magazines turn into a life-sized picture of the nun, Valak. She then gets a vision about human sacrifice and weirdness before she faints.
At the school, the headmistress runs into Maurice at night, and he’s not himself. He leaves her alone, but she hears mysterious children behind a locked door and goes in to see who’s in there. It’s Jacques who beats the old woman to death with a censer. Kate finds her body the next morning.
Irene goes to see an expert at the Catholic Archives, and they talk about Saint Lucy, the patron saint of blindness. “The Eyes of St. Lucy” is a holy relic, and that’s probably what Valak wants. He tells Irene where to find the eyes and also suggests that they can use them to send Valak back to Hell. The eyes are buried somewhere in the boarding school.
At the boarding school, Kate and Sophie, who are mother and daughter, both dance with Maurice. He suddenly has a seizure, and Valak starts chasing all three of them down an endless hallway, where they run into Irene and Debra. When Irene explains that Valak is inside him, no one is more surprised than he is. They knock him out and chain him to the wall.
They go into the room where the headmistress died, and they all think the Eyes of St. Lucy are in there. The “devil’s eyes” in the stained glass point the way to a spot on the floor. They dig and soon find them; in the meantime, Maurice has escaped and turned into a goat monster like the one that used to be in the stained glass. There is much running, screaming, and hiding.
Sophie’s got the Eyes, and Maurice wants them. After a whole big thing in the bell tower, Sophie gives Irene the eyes, and she uses them against Maurice, who laughs and destroys them. Things are looking really bad for our heroes when Irene notices they’re standing in a pool of leaked wine in a wine cellar with loads of casks. They pray and turn all the wine into the blood of Jesus, which is what killed Valak in the first film. The evil nun bursts into flame, and elsewhere, the goat monster goes back into the stained glass.
Maurice survives, and it looks like he, Kate, and Sophie will have a happy ending.
In a mid-credit scene, the Warrens, from the Conjuring movies, get a call from a priest…
Commentary
I think The Nun may be the patron saint of loud jump scares. People appear and disappear into thin air as if they were Batman, and not just the possessed ones, either.
The church knows about a powerful holy relic buried under a school somewhere. They know all about it but have never bothered to send anyone to find it. Ever? Right.
As with the first film, the sets and locations are really nicely done, Valak and the other bad things are nicely done, and it’s all very creepy. Also, like the first film, there’s no explanation for much of what goes on; it’s just weirdness for the sake of weirdness. If you liked the first film, this is more of the same; if you didn’t, then this is… more of the same.