Zakonnica

It’s well crafted and packed with ghostly attractions, an addition to a popular universe that never gets boring and that brings some fresh air to its exhausted premise, at least with the setting. However, it’s also crammed with the expected clichés, predictable and incomprehensibly downplayed by moments or one-liners that feel like out of a second-rate action flick. The titular ghost looks cool, but its inability to deal with only three determined adversaries (of which one is a young, squirrelly novice nun and another a village yokel with a shotgun) gradually weakens its aura. Solid work, but it would have been a lot better with a more inaccessible and properly bloody decadent tone. 60% (21.03.2019)

High hopes were pinned on The Nun this year. Horror films been hugely successful bot at the box-office and with audiences, but The Nun has been a slight flop in terms of audience. The current 65% isn't a downright disaster, but compared to The Conjuring it is a downward slump, but still more successful than Annabelle. The cinema was packed though, so at least commercially I hope the film succeeds. Although I was slightly skeptical, there was no proper trailer at all, in fact I only watched the one minute teaser, in the end I am both pleasantly surprised and pleased. The Nun has the advantage over the competition of being set in a beautiful Romanian castle featuring nuns, which I find much more appealing than a simple house with a family and a demon. The film picks up the pace quite quickly and there is no long wait for the haunted attractions, which is a very good thing. The Nun is also unexpectedly grittier and darker than I was hoping for compared to other mainstream horror movies. There are quite a few jump-scares, but only one worked for me, but the atmosphere itself pulled me in decently and the finale is set up perfectly. Taissa Farmiga is charming in a similar way to her mother and they nicely tie the film together with the The Conjuring at the end. What's a bit of a bummer is that the demon Valak only draws attention to himself at the end, the rest of the film he either can't be seen or there is another evil at work, which I take as a minus as Valak is a great demonic character. Story-wise it could have been more substantial, but that doesn't bother me so much as I haven't seen a better horror movie with nuns so far. For me, a decent job. 80%. (08.09.2018)

In the Conjuring series, the first instalment of which is the genre’s biggest success of the decade, I don’t want to see a young Romanian villager played by a cute American boy who, in the style of Van Helsing, saves lives by firing a shotgun at the last second. At least not when the film tries to create the authentic atmosphere of remote Eastern European (and for many viewers exotic) location that has great horror potential. Due to such cheap moves, the film, despite its rich setting and intense storyline, is only moderately engaging and scary. The work with tension, which is always better when built up slowly and cleverly, sort of fails to convey the intended ceaselessly scary ride. But it’s okay as a spin-off, and not as big a failure as the first Annabelle. (04.10.2018)

Jan Wan is proving that he’s the unconquerable king of current horror movies about ghosts. Corin Hardy and Romanian locations were a great choice for this horror called The Nun. It’s nice that before, when James Wan invited us to the Warrens’ house, he referred to the story of the demon Valak. So he had to know already then that he or a colleague of his would make a movie about it, because the premise is really good! And I haven’t seen so faithfully portrayed period atmosphere in a horror movie in a while. Shooting the film in Romania definitely didn’t hurt – quite the contrary. I really enjoyed the atmosphere of that monastery. (31.12.2018)

Three stars, grudgingly. The screenplay must have been written by an automatic horror generator and it’s surprising that Warners can’t manage their dark universe better on this aspect, but for the consumers it’s enough, I guess. What scared me the most about The Nun is that the same person is credited with the screenplay of the second part of It. I hope they do a better job there. If there’s anything that deserves praise in The Nun is the choice of location and the setting in an old castle as a whole (the Hunedoara castle in Romania); the ancient corridors, cellars, chapels and graveyards do create atmosphere. Unfortunately, the creators were incapable of doing much more with it. Which quite surprised me, Hardy’s previous film, The Hallow, was brilliant. Overall, it’s just fat and salt-free, with a plot that fails to be engaging (not that there is much of it anyway: the characters come, then hang around for while and walk in circles, then one of them literally explains what’s going on, which is followed by a chase with the evil nun, the end), the characters are uninteresting; a scary movie for kids. In a year when we’ve already seen a fairly above-average number of well-made horror films of various sub-genres, these mainstream flicks need to be better. If you’re looking for a good tribute to the old Hammer films, better go for A Cure for Wellness or The Woman in Black. (06.09.2018)