110 min | R | September 8, 2023 | Warner Bros. Pictures
A demon named Valak possesses a man and starts murdering clergy across 1950s Europe. Sister Irene leaves her convent to hunt it down one more time. The hallways are scarier than the screenplay.
The Nun II returns to the Conjuring Universe in 1956 France. A demon named Valak is killing clergy across Europe and leaving scorched bodies in churches. Sister Irene leaves her convent to track it to a boarding school where the possession from the first film has found a new host. The film knows how to construct a haunted corridor and a slow reveal in candlelight. It has far less idea what to do with the space between those moments. This is a franchise installment assembled from set pieces in search of a reason to connect them.
Taissa Farmiga plays Sister Irene as a woman who treats faith as labor rather than comfort. She grounds the supernatural machinery by reacting to it like a person doing a difficult job. Storm Reid plays Sister Debra with a skepticism that the script raises and then abandons. Jonas Bloquet returns as Maurice and carries the film’s only real stakes as the man the demon wears. Katelyn Rose Downey plays Sophie, the schoolgirl caught in the haunting, with a watchfulness the camera uses well. Bonnie Aarons appears as Valak in flashes that work best when she stays in shadow.
Michael Chaves directs with a clear eye for the single sustained image. The standout is a sequence at a magazine kiosk where a demonic face assembles itself from torn pages while Irene watches. The practical construction of that moment gives it a weight that digital effects would drain away. The screenplay by Ian B. Goldberg, Richard Naing, and Akela Cooper, from Cooper’s story, stacks lore and exposition where tension belongs. Chaves can stage a scare. He cannot fix a script that explains its mythology instead of haunting you with it.
The film hits its marks and never finds a pulse. The middle act sags under flashbacks and rules about how the demon can be stopped. Every jump scare arrives on schedule, lands exactly as designed, and leaves nothing behind. Farmiga and Bloquet give the material more conviction than it returns to them. The Nun II is a competent machine for delivering scares to people who already know they want them. It improves on the first film by clearing a low bar and stops there.