The Nun opens in 1952 Romania, where two nuns at the Saint Cartha’s monastery are attacked by an unseen evil force. One of them, Sister Victoria, hangs herself rather than let the demon use her as a vessel. Her body is found by Frenchie, a villager who hauls supplies to the nuns. The Vatican sends Father Burke, a priest with a botched exorcism in his past, and Sister Irene, a nun in her novitiate, to investigate. Corin Hardy directs. Gary Dauberman wrote the screenplay from a story he built with James Wan. The film runs 96 minutes.
Trailer, via Warner Bros..
A Spin-Off Built on Five Days of Confidence
Warner Bros. and New Line announced The Nun as a spin-off to The Conjuring 2 five days after that film opened. Peter Safran and Wan produced. The first script came from David Leslie Johnson; Hardy signed on with a new screenplay by Wan and Dauberman. Shooting began in May 2017 in Bucharest.
That timeline is the whole story of the film’s commercial life. The Nun cost $22 million and grossed $366 million worldwide. It was the highest-grossing entry in the franchise until The Conjuring: Last Rites in 2025. A sequel, The Nun II, followed in 2023.
The critical reception was negative. Metacritic sits at 46 out of 100. The score is 4.6 out of 10.
Taissa Farmiga and the Problem of Presence
Hardy has said he did not want to cast Taissa Farmiga at first, because she is the sister of The Conjuring star Vera Farmiga. He changed his mind after her auditions.
I watched 100 auditions for this role and she had some kind of presence outside of her own body that is evident, and she’s phenomenal.
That is the director talking, and he is right about the presence. Farmiga is the best thing in The Nun. Sister Irene is a woman on the edge of her final vows, sent into a cloistered abbey where the nuns keep silent at night and pray in rotating shifts to hold something back. Farmiga plays her as watchful rather than frightened, which is the correct instinct.
Demián Bichir has the harder job as Father Burke, a man carrying a dead boy he failed to save. Bichir is a fine actor working with a role that mostly requires him to be buried alive, then to identify the entity through a book he saw and took after he was dug out.
Bonnie Aarons returns as the Demon Nun, the incarnation of Valak she first played in The Conjuring 2. She is a physical effect more than a character, and she is effective in the narrow way the part allows. Jonas Bloquet plays Frenchie, the villager who hauls supplies to the nuns and is attacked by the demonic entity in the form of Sister Victoria’s corpse. Charlotte Hope appears as Sister Victoria. Ingrid Bisu plays Sister Oana.
Patrick Wilson, Vera Farmiga and Lili Taylor show up in archive footage from The Conjuring as Ed and Lorraine Warren and Carolyn Perron. It is a nod, not a scene.
The Duke of St. Carta and the Blood of Christ
The Nun has a real mythology and it explains itself clearly. The abbey was built in the Dark Ages as a castle for the Duke of St. Carta, an aristocrat obsessed with the occult. The duke summoned the demon through a rift in the catacombs. Christian knights killed him and sealed the rift with a vial filled with the Blood of Christ, then claimed the abbey to contain the evil.
World War II bombings reopened the rift. The entity got out.
That is a good premise. It gives the film a physical object to protect, a reason the nuns pray in shifts, and a clock. The trouble is what Hardy does with it. The middle of The Nun drags through darkness and scare beats, and the buried-alive sequence plays as a nightmare rather than a scene. Burke gets lured by hallucinations of the boy he lost. Irene digs him out. They go back to the abbey, and only she can enter, because it is cloistered.
The cloister rule is the most interesting thing in the film, and it is handled too quickly. Irene walks in alone. The other nuns tell her about the shifts. Then the movie goes back to the dark.
What the Conjuring Universe Actually Built
The Nun is the fifth installment in the Conjuring shared universe, and it is the one that shows the seams. The Conjuring films work, in this paper’s view, because Wilson and Vera Farmiga play a marriage under pressure. The Nun has no marriage, no family, no domestic stakes. It has a priest, a novice and a demon in a castle, and it treats the demon as a jump-scare delivery system rather than a threat with a plan.
The 96-minute runtime should help. It does not. The film is short and still feels padded, because the investigation keeps resetting: examine the body, take the key, meet the Abbess, come back tomorrow. The Abbess tells them the nuns observe silence at night, so they must return the next day. That reads as a delay dressed as a rule.
Here is the part worth watching, and it is not the demon. It is the business model. A $22 million spin-off announced five days after its parent opened, shot in Romania, released in the United States on September 7, 2018, grossing $366 million. The Nun is not a good movie. It is a very good bet.
The Nun II arrived in 2023. The Conjuring: Last Rites arrived in 2025 and took the franchise’s top gross. Farmiga’s Sister Irene is the only thing here with a pulse, and the film does not seem to know it.
The tagline is “Pray for forgiveness.” The film could have used some.
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