Jump Scares Will Get You in ‘The Nun’ Unless the Boredom Gets You First

A prequel to the longstanding The Conjuring horror series, The Nun follows a young Sister Irene, an old Father Burke, and a village Casanova named French on a survival adventure through a haunted Abbey. If you thought The Conjuring already had a prequel or two, you’d be right about that — both 2014’s Annabelle and 2017’s Annabelle: Creation explains demonic life pre-Conjuring. The Nun fits in specifically as an origin story to Valak, the demon you may remember from The Conjuring 2. If the history confuses you (or disinterests you altogether), rest assured that The Nun doesn’t rely on series knowledge in its exposition, so there’s no entertainment lost in coming in cold. The downside? There’s little entertainment to be found at all. The Nun is a sequence of jump scares that starts strong, but whose horrors rapidly dwindle with each passing encounter.

Set in Romania, a young traveler finds a dead nun hanging by a noose outside a largely abandoned abbey. The audience knows how she got that way — it was the opening scene and the scariest of the film — but the hanging nun is mysterious to the Catholic church who launches an investigation into the nun’s death. A brief leap to the Vatican introduces us to Father Burke (Demián Bichir). He is the priest put in charge of the investigation, and he travels to Romania to uncover the paranormal activity rumored in Romania. He has to bring a partner to help investigate the nuns at the abbey, and that partner is Sister Irene (Taissa Farm…