The Conjuringverse doesn’t have phases, it doesn’t have chapters and, at least to this point, we’ve been spared the image of Ed and Lorraine Warren confidently emerging out of a portal shoulder to shoulder with Father Merrin and Tangina Barrons, ready to snap Lucifer out of existence with the power of shared prayer. What the Conjuringverse has is patience – and for horror fans who love the haunted house that James Wan built, that’s been enough to keep the various spinoffs and sequels in the series distinct and approachable. That’s why The Nun II – which I’ll remind you is a sequel to a prequel to a sequel – ends up being a rather delightful exercise for the franchise. It salvages the elements of The Nun that really worked, improves what didn’t, and puts its lovable lead characters through a series of creative tortures and torments that serve as a reminder that, as the franchise enters its 10th year, the Conjuringverse has plenty of frights left in it.
The Nun 2 sets itself apart from the Annabelle spinoffs – each of which center on a different family – and instead brings back Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga) and Frenchie (Jonas Bloquet) for another round with Valak the demon nun. This decision largely pays off – Irene and Frenchie’s screwball chemistry and eventual respect for each other was one of the best parts of The Nun, so centering the characters here benefits greatly from that groundwork. It’s a little disappointing, though, that they’re separated for the majority of the runtime. After a series of violent deaths in Catholic churches across Europe, Sister Irene is deployed to investigate. You may recall that Valak hitched a ride out of the Abbey of St. Carta stowed away in Frenchie’s soul so, you know, put two and two together on that one. Of course, Irene doesn’t know all that – hence the siloing.
Luckily, Irene and Frenchie are deeply likable protagonists on their own merits. Sister Irene is much more confident and secure in her faith this time, and Farmiga delivers a sensitive and commanding performance in the role. It’s a simple thing, but being convincingly scared onscreen is no easy feat and those Farmiga ladies bring that to the franchise in spades. Irene’s traumatic past – what put her on her path to the church – gets fleshed out a little in flashbacks peppered throughout and her fight against Valak takes on new meaning in that context. But the ways in which her family’s past key into the new additions to Conjuring mythology – and the McGuffin at The Nun II’s heart – are breezed over pretty quickly.
Frenchie has taken up a job at a girls’ boarding school as a professionally hot groundskeeper and has become close with a teacher there, Kate (Anna Popplewell), and her daughter Sophie (Katelyn Rose Downey). At the end of the day, much as I love Irenchie and Bloquet’s performance, his bigger role does feel like a double-edged sword. After all, The Nun ended with a pointed re-surfacing of an early scene from The Conjuring in which Ed and Lorraine Warren screen footage of Frenchie’s exorcism, reminding us that the character’s fate is sealed to some degree. That plot armor takes some of the air out of the peril that Frenchie finds himself in throughout, but his growing affection for Marcella and Sophie really sells the tension once they’re put into peril by Valak’s attacks, and that extends to the rest of the students later on when the demon nun turns up the heat.
In Frenchie’s place, it’s now Irene who finds herself responsible for a novitiate: Sister Debra (Storm Reid), a Black teen whose family sent her away from the racial hell of 1950s Mississippi in favor of a safer life in the church. It’s a deeply interesting setup for the character that gets completely flattened into a retread of Irene’s arc from the first film. Reid brings undeniable personality to Sister Debra, but after her introduction, her utility as the audience’s surrogate mostly dominates her onscreen responsibilities, so the wrap-up of her character’s crisis of faith feels more motivated by an obligation to tie up loose ends than anything else. She does share a standout action moment with Farmiga, however: An exorcism that contributes to the hallway fight’s big 2023 comeback. The Nun II, Guardians 3, TMNT: Mutant Mayhem – I guess everyone’s got Oldboy on the brain.
While The Nun’s Abbey of St. Carta remains one of my favorite horror movie locales of the last few years, moving The Nun II’s action to a more populated French village – and specifically, to a boarding school – opens up more possibilities for Valak to plague characters other than the leads, which inevitably results in some more creative and unexpected scares from all corners of the mid-century European architecture. Director Michael Chaves and writers Akela Cooper (Malignant, M3GAN), Ian B. Goldberg, and Richard Naing (The Autopsy of Jane Doe) spend much of The Nun II’s first act throwing knives into the air, setting up forbidden locations and cursed games that will play out later on – including the triumphant debut of a scary, clompin’, stompin’ goat – and draw these sequences out to fever pitch before letting hell break loose. One out-of-left-field, cruel attack on a kid with zero impact on the story in particular does a great job making the back half of the movie feel unpredictable.
The Nun II marks Chaves’ third outing in the Conjuringverse after The Curse of La Llorona and The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, and he’s proven to be quite the steady hand. While neither of those films achieves the heights of the first two Conjuring movies, each has been an improvement on the last and The Nun II continues that streak, coalescing Chaves’ strong visual sensibilities and humanist interests into a funhouse of terrors.
Verdict
The specifics of The Nun II’s mythology-heavy plot breeze by too fast to give the movie as much weight as it could’ve had, but on a visceral level, it's both inventive with and reverent to Valak’s menace. Moving the action to a boarding school full of scared kids amps up the stakes, with no character (except Frenchie) ever feeling completely safe. Taissa Farmiga and Jonas Bloquet make Irene and Frenchie a pair worthy of the Warrens, and director Michael Chaves keeps that heart in focus even while adding to Valak’s considerable reputation.
