The Nun

The Nun is the most atmospheric and least frightening film in the Conjuring series, and the gap between those two facts is the whole story.

What it has is a setting almost nobody has used properly. The Abbey of St Carta is a vast stone complex in the Romanian mountains with a flooded crypt, a cloister full of kneeling figures, a graveyard with bells tied to the graves in case anybody was buried alive, and a corridor of cells with the names of the dead on the doors. Hardy shot on location in Romania at Corvin Castle and the production design is genuinely excellent — candles, fog, wet stone, nuns in full habit standing in the dark at the end of a row of arches. There are individual images in this film as good as anything in the series.

What it does with them is relentless. The film delivers a sting roughly every four minutes: a figure in a doorway, a figure behind a shoulder, a hand on a shoulder, a face in a window. By the thirty-minute mark the audience has been trained, and training an audience is the opposite of frightening them. The abbey deserved a slow film and got a fast one.

Taissa Farmiga and Demián Bichir are better than the material

Farmiga — cast partly because she is Vera Farmiga's sister, which the series uses as an implied connection it never confirms — plays Sister Irene with real conviction, and her arc from novice to a woman taking final vows in the middle of an emergency is the only thing in the film with a shape. Bichir's Father Burke carries a buried child's death and the film does nothing with it.

Where it falls down

Frenchie is comic relief in a film with no room for it. The mythology is delivered twice, both times as a monologue. The climax is a chase through a flooded crypt that is almost impossible to see. And Valak, a demon the series had built up across two films as a genuinely upsetting image, becomes an ordinary creature the moment it has to run at somebody.

For the series' best film by a wide margin, The Conjuring; for the other object-driven prequel, Annabelle; for the Catholic horror this is reaching for and does not touch, The Exorcist and The Omen.

The short answer: the abbey was built in the Dark Ages by a duke who used it to open a gateway to hell, and was sealed centuries later by the Church using a relic — a vial of the blood of Christ. Allied bombing during the Second World War cracked the seal and let Valak out, which is why the nuns have been maintaining perpetual adoration ever since, and why the last of them hanged herself: to prevent the demon from taking her body. Irene recovers the relic from the flooded crypt. Valak takes Frenchie and then comes for her; she takes her final vows on the spot, and in the confrontation she fills her mouth with the blood of Christ and spits it into Valak's face, which drives the demon back through the rift and reseals it. Frenchie resuscitates her and the two of them leave. In the final scene, set twenty years later, a lecture-hall audience watches Lorraine Warren's film of the exorcism of a man called Maurice Theriault — the same Frenchie, who was marked by Valak with a kiss as he carried Irene out, and who has been possessed ever since. That footage is where The Conjuring 2 begins.

Who or what is Valak?

A demon the series presents as having taken the form of a nun specifically to offend the people it is attacking — the film states that it chose a shape that would be blasphemous to those who would have to look at it. Its name is taken from a figure in the Lesser Key of Solomon, a grimoire that lists a Valak or Valac as a president of hell appearing as a child with angel's wings riding a two-headed dragon. Nothing about the nun habit, the abbey or the Romanian setting comes from that source.

How is the abbey sealed in The Nun?

With the blood of Christ, held as a relic in the abbey's own crypt. The original consecration used it to close the rift the duke opened; the bombing broke the seal; and Irene reseals it by taking the relic into her mouth and spitting it at Valak during the confrontation in the chapel. The film is careful to establish that the relic has to be delivered rather than merely present, which is the mechanism the climax turns on.

Why did the nun hang herself at the start?

To deny Valak a body. The film's opening shows two nuns in the crypt, one of whom is taken; the survivor runs to the window with a rope and a crucifix and hangs herself from the outer wall rather than be possessed. Irene later reads her note and understands that the suicide was a tactical act of faith, not despair, and it is the best idea in the film.

How does The Nun connect to The Conjuring 2?

Through Frenchie. His real name is Maurice Theriault, and Valak kisses the back of his neck as he carries Irene out of the chapel, leaving an inverted-cross mark. The film's closing scene is Lorraine Warren screening footage of his exorcism to an audience in 1972 — the same footage that opens The Conjuring 2, in which Lorraine's vision of Valak is the demon's first appearance in the series.

Is the Abbey of St Carta a real place?

No. There is a real Cistercian abbey at Cârța in Transylvania, which is a ruin and nothing like the building in the film. The Nun was shot mainly at Corvin Castle in Hunedoara and at a built set, and the abbey's history, the duke, the rift and the perpetual adoration are inventions.

Scored against the published rubric, here is what the numbers mean.

The threat at 010 is at the supernatural floor — only 3 works score lower. There is no human antagonist anywhere in the film and no scene that admits a natural reading.

Pace 072 is fast — 95 works are slower, and this is the film's central flaw rather than a neutral fact: a sting every four minutes in a location this good is a waste of the location.

Era bias 086 reads modern — 87 works score lower. A 1952 setting shot on 2018 digital with heavy digital fog, digital candlelight and a modern sub-bass mix.

Viscera 026 is low — 27 works score lower. A hanging, a throat wound, a body in a crypt, and a good deal of blood that is not anybody's injury.

Tone 034 is the least bleak of the three Conjuring films we hold — 85 works score lower. Both leads survive, the rift closes, and the only casualty is a man who does not know what has happened to him yet.

Reality anchor 060 leans towards dream logic — 66 works score lower. The abbey's geography is deliberately unstable: corridors repeat, the graveyard changes, and one character spends a scene inside a sequence that has not happened.

On jump scares: constant. Roughly twenty in ninety-six minutes.