The Nun

One evening not too long ago, Brad and I dialed up The Nun on demand. We settled on this one because all the other movies we'd either seen already or were After Dark.

When she was a teen, Mary attended a private Catholic school in Spain. And as a teen Mary, along with her friends killed one of the nuns at the school. Now and adult and a mother, Mary is haunted by the memories of her sordid past until one night, the ghost of the nun returns to exact a deadly revenge. Mary's daughter Eve witnesses her mother's death and heads to Spain with her friends to meet with Mary's old classmates. As Eve tracks down the women, the nun, too is on the trail. Eventually, her quest brings Eve and her friends to the now-abandoned school where the truth wills out, and the murderous ghostly nun is finally confronted and her spirit laid to rest.

This film actually had some good things going for it. The CGI wasn't terrible and the story was kind of compelling, if maybe a bit drawn out. In spite of some clumsy exposition, the film plods along and the story holds together reasonably well. Though not all that scary, I did get get a bit worked up and had to yell at the screen. So the film was able to elicit an emotional response from me that wasn't anger or hatred, and I took some pleasure guessing at how people would die.

The ending, however, is terrible; I have good reason to believe The Nun suffered from an unfortunate rewrite. The audience is led to beleive that a ghostly nun is out for revenge, and everything they see supports this premise. But when the end comes, what should rightfully be a supernatural thriller, turns out to be a case of schizophrenia. It makes no sense--the neutral third-person pov of the entire narrative simply does not allow for the explanation of events given at the end.

What could have been an average story about a killer nun instead turned out to be a bad story about suppressed homicidal rage. And let me go on the record and say there aren't nearly enough supernatural murderous nun movies out there. Why deprive the world of one more?