“The eyes have it.” Philip K. Dick
The Conjuring universe has just about any horror trope imaginable from simple jump scares to dark chapels. In The Nun II, the Demon Nun (Bonnie Aarons) flashes some scary eyes as it shuttles from a poor caretaker to a mother superior and anywhere in between. Director Michael Chaves and his stable of writers make sure we can see as well as the demon eyes while leaving questions scurrying around like cockroaches.
Because this franchise, with nine films from The Conjuring (2013) in its family, covers the horror formula, it is important for me to enjoy a facet related to my horror experience, in this case eight years of education under the nuns. Delight for me is to correlate here with my Catholic background.
As seen in The Nun II, Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga) is the embodiment of good as she fights the nun who represents evil, Demon Nun Valak. So too, in my little grade school world a spritely novice captures the fancy of us adolescent boys while the eighth-grade crone nun lived to humiliate us. Despite the horror aspects, that education was first rate.
In Nun II, sexuality is an underlying motif as we watch at a boarding school in France the hunky farm boy from The Nun, Frenchie (Jonas Bloquet), flirt with at least 3 of the ladies, young and old, with blue eyes and frame to catch them. He may be a welcoming agent possessed by the bad demon nun as we know from the original Nun.
Mostly set pieces dominate in dusty chapel and dark passageways with no real dramatic purpose other than to scare the bejesus out of everyone.
As we always suspected when we observed from our grade-school perspective, sex was going to be withheld from everyone. After all, when the crone nun publicly called me a “dirty thing” for holding a girl’s hand, we knew sex was a long way off in our franchise and not a good thing at that.
The Nun II deftly obscures one of its real subjects, the denial of sex, when it uses all the tropes available to the genre. The cinematography, with its mostly dark sets, somber blues, and underplayed reds and oranges, hides the Demon Nun and the remedy for the invasion as well as the homely embrace of sexuality, a virtue we always suspected was lacking in a nunnery.
It would have been good to know more about Sister Irene’s ancestry and more so about the story behind St. Lucy, the patron saint of the blind. But that would have made it easier to flesh out the eye motif I spied early on. Oh, well, enough to be satisfied that I did reasonably well with my education from the nuns. As for my healthy attitude toward sex, that’s another Conjuring I suspect.
The Nun II
Director: Michael Chaves (The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It)
Screenplay: Ian Goldberg (Eli), et al. Based on characters created by James Wan and Gary Dauberman
Cast: Taissa Farmiga (The Bling Ring), Jonas Bloquet (The Nun)
Run Time: 1h 50m
Rating: R
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts NPR’s It’s Movie Time and hosts Cinema Classics as well as podcasts Back Talk and Double Take out of WCBE 90.5 FM. Contact him at JohnDeSando52@gmail.com
