The Nun 2

 

Titles like "The Nun 2" strike me at first as a studio placeholder used until something better is offered but then nothing ever is.

I understand the marketing purpose of using numbers in titling sequels and prequels (dayquels? nightquels?) but I wish studios would give more thought to individualizing the chapters in a franchise.

I do like that this branch of the popular Conjuring movies (a half-dozen pictures by now) went for something different in 2018 with The Nun, even if the demon-possession plotlines and the jump scares are pretty standard fare.

In The Nun series, Taissa Farmiga plays Sister Irene, which this former Catholic schoolboy thought was an interesting naming choice considering the story is set in 1956, before the Vatican let nuns keep their birth names.

Irene is a Vatican-trained and endorsed exorcist, another progressive move for the famously conservative Roman Catholic Church of the '50s. But, then, who am I to cavil about sensible narrative choices in a picture about a devil nun seeking the gouged eyeballs of a third-century saint.

Irene, who is living quietly in a convent when the story opens, is contacted after a priest in France is immolated by the evil sister Valek. Church sleuths figure the spirit is after St. Lucy's eyes because with them she would be unstoppable in her pursuit of, well, it's not entirely clear what but let's assume its world domination.

Irene is joined in her righteous crusade by a spunky novice at the convent named Debra (Storm Reid). Debra is having a crisis of faith that sounds mostly like bitterness about her father ordering her into a nunnery. Irene proposes that facing a fallen angel will square away all of Debra's doubts.

The pair eventually find themselves at a girls boarding school that was once a monastery and is likely where they will find the holy relic Irene will use to send the demon "back to hell" -- a line anyone who has seen a horror flick will surely anticipate. The caretaker at the school, a young hunk named Maurice (Jonas Bloquet), who was in the previous film, seems to be unwittingly transporting the demon from place to place. Must he die for the world to be free of Sister Valek? Meh.

Michael Chaves' The Nun 2 is diverting with some solid scares but the story seems to lack conviction beyond keeping the Conjuring franchise moving forward.