Fool me once, shame on you; fool me thrice, call me a sucker. The Nun is the fifth installment in the The Conjuring franchise, and after the first two rather good films, this is the third not to be worth a watch. The series has strayed further and further from the spirit that was once imbued by filmmaker James Wan.

Directed by relative newcomer Corin Hardy and written by James Wan with all the verve of a man collecting paychecks, The Nun is strictly for diehard fans who can’t get enough of the lore even if it means sitting through a film with nun … err … none of the scares they paid for.

The film is set in 1952 in Romania where a supernatural incident at the Cârga Monastery catches the attention of The Vatican after Maurice “Frenchie” Theriault (Jonas Bloquet) encounters the body of a nun.

Deciding to investigate, The Vatican sends Father Burke (Demián Bichir) and Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga) to Romania to find Frenchie. Here, some fans may notice that Sister Irene looks quite a bit like Lorraine Warren (Vera Farmiga) from The Conjuring and that’s because the two happen to be real-life sisters!

The Nun is for diehard fans who can’t get enough of the The Conjuring series lore

Soon, our heroes have firsthand encounters with a demonic presence that terrorises them, including a bit where the priest is buried alive only to be rescued by his nun companion. The strange thing about all of these set-pieces is that they don’t make a lick of sense. They only exist to hold the audience’s interest, as they don’t seem to be an effective way for a demon to kill its enemies. Well, unless the demon is especially incompetent and is mocked by other demons in murder school.

The frights in The Nun are of the poorest variety. Watching the film I found my mind drifting on several occasions because not only does Corin Hardy employ the cheapest form of cinematic frights — jump scares — but foreshadows them with eye-rolling predictability. To be frank, some of these are so amateurish in terms of technique that you’d think a student directed them. Thankfully, the cinematography of the European landscape by Maxime Alexandre is quite gorgeous, and the visuals are a bright spot in a film loaded with pedestrian sequences.

Every time I watch a horror film, regardless of quality, I find that some members of the audience are laughing during a scene or two. This is either because the entire affair is so scary that chuckles function as remedy for the anxiety that has been built, or because the film is trying too hard. In The Nun it is of the latter variety, where a few sequences meant to be serious come across as comical. But interestingly, a few of the laughs are most certainly intended. Surprisingly, The Nun throws in a bit of dark humour, which is something new to the franchise. If James Wan wants to continue to cash in the royalty money, then perhaps that’s the way to go; turn the franchise into a dark comedy ala Evil Dead. Evidently, they’ve run all out of ideas as far as the horror is concerned.

Rated R for terror, violence and disturbing/bloody images

Published in Dawn, ICON, September 16th, 2018