So here goes. The Nun II is the sequel to The Nun, which was a spin-off from The Conjuring 2 (The Conjuring is the franchise that also gave us the evil doll movie Annabelle). Do you need to know any of this to enjoy The Nun's comeback? No you do not. The Nun is a demon who likes freaking people out by looking like an evil nun: there, you're up to speed.
The Nun II hits the ground running in a way that makes it seem like this particular demon is not going to be messing around when it comes to racking up a body count, but don't worry - once things settle down the Nun gets back in the habit (sorry) of tormenting its victims in the kind of jump scare-packed fashion that enables a film like this to run longer than half an hour.
As for the scares themselves? They're usually decent concepts well executed - there's one involving a magazine stand that's a high point - but they're rarely truly scary. You get why the people in the film are freaking out; in the cinema, not so much.
Story-wise, after seemingly defeating the Nun in the first film, Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga) has retired to a quiet nunnery where she can spend her days looking enigmatic while the older nuns recount the plot of the first film then add "and nobody knows where the Sister who helped defeat the demon is today".
At least she has the rebellious (well, she smokes, which isn't really all that rebellious in the 1950s when this is set) Sister Debra (Storm Reid) to hang out with. And then she gets a call from the Church hierarchy. Looks like The Nun is tearing a path across Europe and only one extremely expendable sister can stop its reign of terror.
Meanwhile on the other side of the continent, fellow first film survivor Frenchie (Jonas Bloquet) - who is actually from Romania, but is now back in France - is charming both the students and the teachers at a girls boarding school. It used to be a monastery and no spoilers but there is a lot of extremely heavy-handed exposition in this film so you really don't have to worry about missing something that'll be important later. Unfortunately for Frenchie, evil seems to have followed him to the school and it's brought a lot of jump scares with it.
The two plots run parallel for a while just to drag things out, with Sisters Irene and Debra trying to figure out where the Nun is heading and what it wants (turns out it's torching priests and killing kids for a reason), while at the boarding school it rapidly becomes obvious that not all is well with Frenchie. Eventually everyone meets up and the film switches from jump scares (which, in case you missed it, this has a lot of) to full on demonic activity.
If you're expecting any kind of set limits or clear parameters on the Nun's evil powers, forget it: one character comes back from the dead but isn't really a zombie, while another monster is seemingly summoned out of a stained glass window. If it's scary or creepy, then the Nun can probably do it; on the flip side, if the story requires a human to fight against demonic possession or escape certain death, they can probably manage it. Basically, it all evens out.
As a demon-themed thrill ride this has it's good points. Farmiga makes for a compelling and plausibly fragile lead, and the fact that pure evil here lurks inside the only male character (though some of the school students are pretty nasty bullies) is no doubt no coincidence. Director Michael Chaves (a Conjuring-verse veteran) eventually builds enough of a convincingly intense mood towards the end to justify proceedings, but there's not a lot here that'll inspire nightmares.
That said, it probably doesn't pay to think too long about how this occasionally feels a little too much like propaganda for the Catholic Church. It's a movie set in the 1950s where agents of the Church go into a boarding school to save kids from evil; there'd be some parts of the world where that might be harder to believe than the idea of a demonic nun who makes people burst into flames just by looking at them.
- Anthony Morris
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