2023-09-13 06:26:00
The second part of the second spin-off of the franchise “The Conjuring” does not have much to offer, other than a few ideas emerging from its fetishization of the French 50s.
It’s not much, but it’s not bad in the context of contemporary American horror exploitation cinema: there is a good scene in The Nun 2, the kind never seen before, inventive, playful, almost scotch. An apparition scene, deep in a dark underground, in which Sister Irene – a detective nun seen in the first part of this extension of the Conjuring franchise – has lost her way before freezing in front of a newsstand. We are in the south of France, in the 1950s. The paper is not yet glossy but the magazine press is sufficiently illustrated to allow Michael Chaves to make the demon emerge from an exquisite corpse of loose leaves. The rest of this deliciously inept horror film is appreciated above all for the picturesqueness of its reconstruction, Christian-Jaque revised and corrected by a street-food chef, his head inflated with insane high-concepts.
We knew the American fetish for old Catholic Europe and the France of the steeples immediately after the war in particular – the same one liberated by the GIs – Chaves and his team create here a banquet of hallucinatory images lit by dying light bulb, ideal setting for what reveals less yet another gothic platitude than a visitation of Indiana Jones to the Bouches-du-Rhône. Because we are looking for the trace of Valak, (poltergeist from Conjuring 2 who has the merit of ensuring his retirement for the actress Bonnie Aarons) after he took possession of the good guy Maurice, handyman in a boarding school for young people girls with very crisp parquet floors, located in an ancient monastery where a famous magical relic, the eyes of Saint Lucy of Syracuse, is said to be buried. Where are we going with this? Toward cushy action and some predictable jump scares rather than a tribute to Franju, we reveal. And if the fear is kept desperately waiting until the end of the credits, we rejoice when everything ends in an inflammation of consecrated wine: a tribute to drinking in a bad horror film means that it cannot be completely do badly.
The Nun 2 by Michael Chaves. With Bonnie Aarons, Taissa Farmiga… (1h50).
#Nun #bitter #monastery #Liberation