Film Review: "The Nun" (2017).

"Witness the Darkest Chapter in The Conjuring Universe" with The Nun. This gothic supernatural horror film directed by Corin Hardy and written by Gary Dauberman. It is a spin-off of 2016's The Conjuring 2 and the fifth installment in the Conjuring Universe franchise. When a young nun at a cloistered abbey in Romania takes her own life, a priest with a haunted past and a novitiate on the threshold of her final vows are sent by the Vatican to investigate. Together they uncover the order's unholy secret. Risking not only their lives but their faith and their very souls, they confront a malevolent force in the form of the same demonic nun that first terrorized audiences in 'The Conjuring 2,' as the abbey becomes a horrific battleground between the living and the damned.

In mid June 2016, five days after the successful release of The Conjuring 2, the "Demon Nun" proved to be a popular horror antagonist. Thus, Warner Bros, Pictures and New Line Cinema announced a spin-off film focusing on the character, making her the second character from the franchise to get her own feature after Annabelle (2014), with an initial script penned by David Leslie Johnson. In mid February 2017, it was announced that Hardy was hired to direct with a new script penned by Dauberman. During the filming of Annabelle: Creation (2017), Safran revealed that the film would chronologically come first in the Conjuring Universe, making it a further prequel to The Conjuring series and Annabelle series. By early May, Demián Bichir, Taissa Farmiga, Jonas Bloquet, Charlotte Hope, and Ingrid Bisu were cast, with Bonnie Aarons reprising her role. At the same time, principal photography commenced, and wrapped in late June. Filming took place in Bucharest, Romania. The film was originally set for a mid-July 2018 release date, but was pushed back closer to September 7, in hopes of replicating the commercial success of It (2017) the year prior.

The film stars Bichir, Farmiga, Bloquet, Hope, Bisu, and Aarons. The best performance in the film came from... nobody. Nobody at all. What a shame.

Nothing more than a case of a studio trying to cash in on the previous film. It's dull, predictable and really dumb. With no time wasted on comic relief as it takes itself surprisingly seriously, Hardy leaves most of the heavy lifting to our own familiarity with the basic material and our lowered expectations with carbon copy. In the hands of a better creative team, an all-Demon Nun film might have been a grand slam. Here it's a bloop single, narrowly avoiding a tag out on the basepaths. Watching the film is like watching a movie you've seen a dozen times before, just with different actors and slight variations on the same scare tactics. For much of its running time, the film is so bereft of ideas for scare tactics that when the Demon Nun isn't involved, it's hard to differentiate it from any other domestic horror movie that's ever come out.

Simon says The Nun receives: