THE NUN...

Are nuns scary?

The Nun, which is an offshoot of The Conjuring franchise, wants us to think so. An earlier entry (The Conjuring II)  introduced this character of a menacing nun. She was fine in a cameo, but it's hard to believe anyone thought she deserved her own feature.

The Conjuring movies have good casts and, despite rehashes of effects that seemed lifted from Poltergeist, occasional scary moments. The Nun, however, is all noise, no finesse. 

She doesn't even have a ruler to smack you on the knuckles.

The gist is simple enough. In 1952, a nun commits suicide in a Romanian abbey. A priest who investigates such things, a so-called "miracle hunter," and young Sister Irene, are soon on the way to Romania to look into the matter. Along the way they meet a young local named "Frenchie." He knows the area, and actually saw the dead nun's body swinging from a rope, her face eaten by birds.

The trio spend a lot of time wandering around the abbey in the dark, and are perplexed by the usual haunted house stuff: radios coming on unexpectedly, shadowy figures appearing and disappearing, mysterious bloodstains, that sort of dross.

Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga) has yet to take her vows, which makes her seem vulnerable as she nervously explores the old place with a lantern. Meanwhile, the priest (Demian Bicher)   wears a fedora so we think he's an Indiana Jones type, but he's not much of an adventurer. He can't seem to avoid falling into open graves, and he's harboring some guilt feelings after an exorcism gone wrong in his younger days.

As for Frenchie (Jonas Blochet), he seems to be there because the producers thought the film should have a young man in it. For a French-Canadian in 1952, his dialogue and mannerisms are suspiciously modern.

There's a mildly interesting backstory where we learn the abbey was built by a worshiper of Satan, who was  vanquished by members of the Knights Templar (armed, thankfully, with a vial containing the blood of Jesus). Since that time, the evil forces have been kept in check by a team of nuns praying constantly over a crack in the abbey's floor.

Why did a man build an abbey just to raise demonic forces? And once he was killed by the knights, couldn't the place be torn down or blown up? Why keep it standing? Were good abbeys hard to find in those days?

There aren't many answers to be found in The Nun. Just hackneyed special effects, and a lot of hands reaching out to grab people. That's the motif here: hands reaching out of graves, out of mirrors, out of walls, out of closets; hands, hands, hands, everywhere.

The maker of the film, Corin Hardy, seems to have a phobia about being touched.

The rest of the screenplay is bulging with cliches, everything from being buried alive, to snakes, to skeletons, and severed limbs. Ravens, too. Lots of ravens, and nuns babbling in Latin, and ominous choral music.

The most menacing nun, with her cloudy grey eyes and pointed teeth, is creepy enough, but she doesn't have any purpose. She appears to have super powers - she can knock Frenchie halfway to the moon just by hissing at him - yet in her climactic showdown with Sister Irene, who is just a skinny little thing, she struggles.

The problem with so many contemporary, mainstream horror movies is that the filmmakers can't really scare anybody, so they try to blow us away with carnage and windstorms and sinkholes. Despite the sound and fury, and the massive publicity campaign that resulted in a strong opening weekend, The Nun fails as part of The Conjuring series, or as a stand-alone movie.

The Nun also fails in that it's a bit like that older brother who keeps jumping out at you in the dark. There are so many levels of the human mind to tap, but all this movie wants to do is put you in a headlock and give you a noogie.