The Conjuring franchise is a strange one. On the one hand, it seems to exist to whitewash the reputations of Ed and Lorraine Warren, a pair of self-styled paranormal investigators who exploited tragedies for money and fame. On the other hand, the films themselves seem to be quite successful as a horror franchise, eschewing a lot of the sensibilities of modern horror films. They were popular enough that an entire expanded universe has grown from it, with not one but two spinoff franchises, a crossover with another horror franchise, and even having a character make a cameo in Wolves at the Door, that horrible movie about the Manson murders. With both the Warrens dead (and Ed's reputation especially being basically mud at this point) it remains to be seen how long the franchise will hold to its original intention. In the mean time, The Nun II is here to give audiences more of what they want: Valak, the apparent fan-favorite demon nun first spotted in The Conjuring 2.
While I thought the original Nun was a decent gothic chiller, unpretentious and even cleverly funny in that 1990s-era, post-Indiana Jones adventure movie kind of way, The Nun II tries to do the same thing, but as so often happens with sequels, especially horror movie sequels, it winds up overshooting the mark. Everything has to be bigger, badder, meaner, with higher stakes and a more explosive finale, and I'm going to be real honest with you, most of the time it just doesn't work. And it doesn't work for The Nun II.
It's not all bad. The setup is pretty simple: Tarascon, a town in France, is plagued by a series of hauntings and murders, and Sister Irene is sent by the Vatican to investigate, as she's the only known survivor of the Valak incident in Romania four years earlier. Tracing a series of murders of priests and nuns across Europe, she soon realizes that they coincide with the travels of Maurice the French-Canadian drifter who helped in the exorcism in Romania. As hinted at the end of the first film, Maurice is indeed possessed, though he's unaware of it and currently spending his days as a maintenance man and groundskeeper for a boarding school in none other than Tarascon.
The Nun II takes a different structure from its predecessor. Where the first film was a pretty straightforward gothic horror, the sequel plays off more like The Exorcist meets The Da Vinci Code. It's two separate story threads, with the first revolving around Maurice and the school, with a collection of stock characters like the strict older headmistress, a trio of teen girl bullies, and a young girl named Sophie and her mother (who's a teacher at the school) whom Maurice befriends. At night, Valak is more active, and delights in scaring the hell out of Sophie; the paranormal activity draws Irene and her novice friend Debra (who was forced into the nunnery and tags along heedless of any consequences she might face) after they go on a little trip around France tracing the origins of Valak and the relic that the demon seems to be looking for.
While there's a lot of fun scares in The Nun II, it ultimately devolves into the thing that kills a lot of movies like this, with an over-the-top finale that involves exploding barrels of sanctified wine and lots of fire. Granted, the original film wasn't exactly subtle either, and I suppose it's not fair to knock either film too much when it happens so often in paranormal horror movies. But I'm forever a proponent of the "hint, don't show" school of horror. The demon is most interesting in its nun guise, but we get several glimpses of its demon form which just looks goofy. (Annabelle: Creation did the same thing.)
Nonetheless, The Nun II is an okay film if you like this kind of thing. I wouldn't exactly call it smart, but it doesn't really need to be. The demon nun is a popular character in the Conjuring expanded universe, a none-too-holy figure with a taste for theatrics, and that's always going to play well among aficionados of schlocky paranormal horror movies. If you liked the original film, you'll probably like this one too.
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