The Nun: The Conjuring’s Big Scary Demon Wins

The Nun was the Conjuring’s big, bad, overarching evil demon. As an audience, we’ve been seeing her throughout the franchise. She’s been built up as the most evil, hardest to defeat of all the terrors in the Warren’s long history of paranormal investigation. The Nun is the one who threatened Ed’s life. By the time The Nun released, we were truly ready to get a movie featuring her.

We got that in the form of a prequel. Not exactly an origin story, but a story about how she came to make her way into the world. Escaping the confines of captivity by the Catholic church. The only downside to this story arch is that since we know she fights Lorraine decades later in The Conjuring 2, our heros will have to ultimately lose in this movie.

Spoilers galore for The Nun. Check it out here if you haven’t seen it yet.

There are crosses everywhere. Too freaking many honestly. There has to be a point of diminishing returns. We are at the Abbey of St. Carta in Romania and two nuns are rushing through a hallway with an unfathomable number of crosses. Stuck into the floor, hanging from the ceiling. This was THE arts and crafts project. A river of fog obscures the floor.

They reach a door that reads, ‘God ends here,’ which is counter to my understanding of omnipresence. Perhaps they made a special exception for this specific area. The older nun heads in telling the younger that if this doesn’t work we are out of options. The fog is even worse now. She comes crawling back out, bloodied and near death, hands the younger nun a key and tells her the evil is on its way and you best not let it get an escape vessel. Then gets ripped back into the dark by unseen hands in classic horror movie style. The younger nun runs away in a panic.

But not enough of a panic because she turns back to watch the evil follow her at a snail’s pace. I’m not convinced it actually wants to catch her. She grabs a rope and walks to the window, asking God to forgive her for the sin she is going to commit. This is the 2nd time we’ve had preemptive confession in these movies, so I guess that’s just cannon in the conjuring. Since the evil nun is gliding at about half a mile and hour, our good nun has plenty of time to hang herself from the window. Ahh defeated again.

Frenchie (Jonas Bloquet), who has his own grave in my horror movie victims’ Halloween graveyard, rides up to the abbey. He’s got this tiny, crappy cart to deliver supplies to the nuns. He sees what I guess he thinks are too many crows, so he looks around a bit, finding the good nun from the beginning hanging at the front door of the abbey. She dramatically falls from the rope as he watches.

The Vatican calls Father Burke (Demián Bichir) for an emergency meeting. They heard a nun hung herself and need him to investigate. Burke calls bull on this as a reason to send him out and questions the honestly of the Vatican. He’s right because they proceed to maybe not lie, but definitely not tell him the truth about his companion. They send him to find Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga) and say she is familiar with the territory.

Meanwhile, Irene is just trying to be the best elementary school teacher ever. Of course, the powers that be don’t like her relaxed approach to teaching or religion. And she actually isn’t a nun just yet. She still has to take her vows. Burke meets up with Irene and tells her where they are going. She assumes there’s some mistake since she has never been to Romania, but Burke knows all about the Vatican’s games and he tells her there’s a reason they picked her.

They meet up with Frenchie so he can take them up to the convent. He assumes Burke is an angry father or husband because he slept with Irene. Listen Frenchie, I’m not here to slut shame, but this is not a time with great birth control or STI treatment. You should probably not sleep with so many randos that you don’t recognize them. Calm down. Anyway, he finds out that Irene is a nun and mostly stops hitting on her. Mostly.

Frenchie tells the group that the town hates the abbey. It’s evil and brings about bad luck. This will barely explain any of this. Frenchie takes them up to the convent, but the horse will only go so far. It knows the place is evil and will not risk it. Animals know things. You really should have a few dogs do a quick sweep of any house you plan to buy, just to be sure.

They pass by a wild amount of crosses in the ground and hanging out Blair Witch style from the trees on their way to the abbey. Apparently, this is to keep the evil in. Not to keep it out. Frenchie put the dead nun into the icehouse to keep her…fresh, I guess. So that’s where we are going. She’s moved a little. Instead of lying down as Frenchie left her, she is sitting up.

He freaks out. Understandably. But this is a jump scare only for him, so it seems like a waste of the demon’s time. Burke feels they should properly bury the nun. The three of them pick a spot and take care of it. Before every even going up to the abbey. For all they know, the nuns inside don’t even know she’s dead.

The graves around them have bells on them in case someone gets accidentally buried alive. They could ring the bell and the graveyard guard would know to open the grave. I’m sure this little factoid is just here for fun and will have no further relevance. The group walks over to the front door where there is still fresh blood. Both gross and impossible. Burke touches it and I totally thought he was about to lick it. Thankfully, he doesn’t.

They enter a room that’s like part library, part mausoleum. All uncomfortable. There’s a large throne-like chair in the middle. They walk around for a good while before Irene sees the head nun sitting on the throne chair on the opposite side of the one we saw when we entered. I guess this room needs 2 of those. This lady just let a bunch of people walk in and said nothing. Irene seems afraid of her. Especially when she doesn’t respond to Irene’s hello. Burke assumes she’s the Reverend Mother and maybe, but are they usually so demon-like?

She doesn’t even seem to know one of the nuns is missing and that seems like part of her job, honestly. I’m not sure this is a safe work environment if people can just die and decompose on the front steps and no one notices. Mother, here, is not thankful they noticed she just tells them to leave. A bit of a red flag. Burke tells her that the church is going to send way meaner people if they don’t get this investigation handled, so she lets them stay in the convent overnight because all the nuns take a vow of silence from sundown until mid-morning.

Burke tells Frenchie to head out and come back in a few days. They have no way of communicating with him when he leaves, so perhaps some specifics are in order. Like come back in 47 hours exactly? Frenchie does not want to be here at night because we all know curses get more cursey in the dark. Frenchie sees a nun as he is crossing the cross field. And I assure you the harvest is plentiful. He calls after her because even though he seems to know he is in a horror movie, instincts are hard to overcome.

She reappears with a noose and hangs herself above him. The rope snaps and she falls on him, screaming all evil. He runs out past the last circle of crosses and she does not follow. It appears to work to keep the evil in. Excellent job nuns. In one of my favorite scenes ever, he just steals a cross out of the ground and takes it with him.

Burke and Irene sit down to dinner. This is where we find out why she was chosen. She has visions. Someone has to have visions or how would we solve any of these things. They kept telling her Mary points the way. Thank God she told Burke that, because when it hits the fan, she will not remember this. Burke shares his backstory now. He tragically lost a child during an exorcism. I think that’s just the odds. 93% chance of death, 5% chance demons take over, 2% of success. Possession in these movies is about as survivable as rabies.

That night, a radio turns on softly. Burke hears it, somehow. He pops up, fully dressed, to investigate. He chases a little ghost boy (my god I wonder who?) through so much laundry. They head to the graveyard to play hide and seek and the boy pops out, jump scaring Burke into a conveniently placed open grave with a customized gravestone and bury him alive. They even give Burke a bell to ring. If you wanted to kill him, you wouldn’t label him.

Irene hears the bell? Or maybe it’s the vision thing because the bell seems way too far away to actually hear and wakes up looking for Burke. She looks around, eventually ending up in the small chapel. It is very crowded with nuns. They must have snuck in on her. A nun shadow walks along the wall. Much the same way as it did in The Conjuring. This time it ends up facing Irene in a mirror. The room is suddenly empty, sneaky nuns, and the evil nun attacks Irene and throws the enormous cross at her, sending her running outside.

Irene hears that bell again and runs to the graveyard. The demon rings a bunch of bells so Irene can’t locate the correct one. Not giving him a bell was an option, but this works too, I guess. She uses her vision powers to focus in on his location and gets to work unburying him. Before she gets him free, a demon joins him in the coffin. It’s really only made for one, so things are pretty crowded. Irene gets him out and they find that not only was the demon in there but there was a body too. Whoa. And some lore relevant books. Does this demon even want to win?

They still go back the next day to interview the nuns and to my shock, the Mother nun lets them in. Irene goes through a giant iron gate into the covent and Burke settles down in the entryway to study the books he found in his grave. In no time flat, he will figure out the demon’s name is Valak. Lorraine should take some pointers from him. The gate to the convent comes down again, and he knows Irene will be trapped inside.

Not one person meets Irene at the door, so she is forced to wander around looking for someone. She finds someone praying in the church, but another nun, Sister Oana (Ingrid Bisu), stops her from bothering her. In this convent, someone is praying 24 hours a day, and it needs to stay that way. Oana tells Irene that the abbey was once owned by a duke who performed witchcraft and rituals trying to open a gateway to bring a demon to the world.

The church busted in on him before he finished, closed the gateway with a relic, and took over the abbey. Since then, the nuns have prayed to keep the evil at bay. It worked for a while, but then during the war, the church was bombed and the demon has been more active since then. All the nuns have seen the evil nun running around, and it isn’t a great time. They’re concerned. Oana says the abbey is closed for the evening and gives Irene a room to sleep in. I don’t think she was planning on a sleepover. And I seriously don’t think she planned to be LOCKED INTO HER ROOM.

Burke is still freaking out about Irene when he realizes the Reverend Mother is sitting in that chair again. Was she always there? Did she jump through the gate? She tells Burke, Irene is gone and he will never get in to save her. Does he realize this is a demon yet? Well, he’s about to. He reaches out to remove her veil after she appears to die and yep. She grabs him for a moment and then reverts back to a dead body. Then she disappears. I’ve got no idea what her deal is.

Irene wakes up to find a random person praying in her room. No one needs that. She confronts her, but I guess this nun isn’t up for chatting because she jumps out the window. Then the bedroom door magically unlocks. Irene wanders down the cross filled hallway from the beginning.

She is about to enter the extra evil door from the beginning, but it opens on its own and the nun starts after her. Wind pulls her back, almost getting back the key. This is the same key that the hanging nun was found with. It is back to being important again. Sister Oana saves Irene just before the nun grabs her. But… these nuns, other than the evil one, aren’t really here, so how did she just get saved by a vison? And even in this vision timeline, Oana is dead. I’m incredibly confused.

Oana tells Irene they are meeting in the chapel to pray. Irene arrives to find a few nuns praying and one nun covered in a sheet. This deceased nun is sister Oana! SO MUCH CONFUSION. A bunch of nuns walk into the chapel and join Irene to pray. It doesn’t work great though and they all get thrown about the room. A bunch of them die instantly. The rest aren’t looking great.

Burke is getting attacked by the demon a bunch. And I’m impressed that it can be in so many places at once. He realizes the icehouse has an entrance to the convent and tries getting in that way. In the icehouse, he sees a bell. Do not get distracted. Focus. But he doesn’t, of course, and it’s the demon pretending to be the hanging nun again. He is only saved by Frenchie’s arrival. Turns out the town bartender was going on and on about how evil the abbey was and Frenchie was pretty worried Irene and Burke were going to die, so he came up early.

Irene is still praying. Now only with maybe 3 other nuns. The rest are dead. When Frenchie and Burke pound on the church door to be let in. She rushes over and tells them to join her and the others to pray. Burke’s like, what others? You mean you and the mice that have infested this place? Irene turns and sees the chapel as dilapidated and with no praying nuns. Just the one body still on the floor but far more desiccated. She takes this turn of events incredibly well.

I’m so confused by these visions. Why wouldn’t they have told her what was up more clearly? Why did she not realize they were visions? Was Irene living out their last days? And most distressing, where was she really sleeping?

Burke and Irene conclude that this place is no longer holy, completing the investigation they went for. Great, let’s get out of here, right? Nope, Irene wants to stay to close the gateway again. They need to go into the basement behind the ‘God ends here’ door to get the relic and do so. But first Irene wants to take her nun vows. I get she is fully committed to her service, but there is not time for this. Defeat evil, then take part in lengthy rituals. You are giving this demon too much time to possess you.

They get to the correct hallway but can’t find the entrance. Burke sees a Mary statue pointing at the wall. MARY POINTS THE WAY! Thank God for him, because Irene didn’t even notice. Behind the secret door, they find the blood of Christ. Just a tiny bit.

/image – blood

They go through the door to the catacombs and split up to find the gateway. How do they plan to communicate if they find it? They have no phones or anything. This is a terrible idea. There’s also a prison down here. That’s horrible. I hope the nuns weren’t using that. Everyone is chased by gaggles of nuns. This is why you are safer in groups. Irene finds a star on the floor surrounded by black candles. I swear these are protection circles, actually, but in this case it’s a demon circle. She gets stuck inside it.

Frenchie walks in after her, but now the room is full of Irene’s wearing bags over their heads. He has no idea which one is her. He walks through them while they crack their necks and finds the real Irene demon possessed in the circle. She says really unnecessarily mean things to him. We don’t know enough about him to know why these are the things that cut deep, but they do. Frenchie’s not a half bad exorcist because he gets the demon out of her. It strangles him and tosses Irene into a nasty catacomb sesspool.

Burke reaches this underground pool and is promptly attacked by that kid he didn’t save. It throws up a snake that bites his eye. The nun drops Frenchie and head for Irene, floating toward her like a crocodile. She grabs Irene and tries to drown her. Maybe Burke could make this water holy water? He doesn’t though. He isn’t quick like that. Instead, Irene grabs the blood of Christ and pretends to die. The nun doesn’t notice the ruse and lifts Irene triumphantly in the air. Irene spits the blood all over her face. Gross but effective. The nun is sucked back through the portal, conveniently located at the center of this pool, and the gateway closes.

Everyone lives! Except all those nuns. And it seems like they searched the castle and found them all because we see the burial. That was probably a lot of work. Our three heroes ride home victorious. But we know there are later movies. So the catch is that we can see little upside down crosses under Frenchie’s skin. So I guess he was possessed, and the nun was just going for a twofer when she tried to get Irene.

Flash forward 20 years later and we have reached the Conjuring 1, where we watch footage of Frenchie’s exorcism. There’s also the nun 2 later where Frenchie must still be possessed. So they tried but were not successful. Exorcisms just don’t work.

See you all next week for the basically un-advertised Conjuring film, La Llorona.