The Nun is a 2018 American gothic supernatural horror film directed by Corin Hardy and written by Gary Dauberman, from a story by Dauberman and James Wan. It serves as a spritual spin-off to The Conjuring 2 and is the fifth installment in The Conjuring shared universe. The film stars Taissa Farmiga, Demián Bichir and Jonas Bloquet, with Bonnie Aarons reprising her role as the Demon Nun, an incarnation of Valak, from The Conjuring 2. The plot follows a Roman Catholic priest and a nun in her novitiate as they uncover an unholy secret in 1952 Romania. It is followed by a sequel The Nun II, released in 2023.
Warner Bros. Pictures and New Line Cinema announced The Nun, a spin-off film to The Conjuring 2, which had opened five days earlier, with Safran and Wan producing. The initial script for the film was written by David Leslie Johnson. Hardy had signed on to direct The Nun with a new screenplay from Wan and Dauberman. Principal photography began in May 2017 in Bucharest, Romania, and during filming, the set was blessed by an Eastern Orthodox priest.
The Nun was released in the United States on September 7, 2018, by Warner Bros. Pictures. Critics praised its performances and atmosphere, but criticized its weak narrative and inconsistent logic. It grossed $365million worldwide, becoming the highest-grossing film of the series. In 2023, a sequel The Nun II, was released with Michael Chaves directing and James Wan and Peter returning as co-producers.
Plot
In 1952 Romania, two nuns living at the Saint Cartha's monastery are attacked by an unseen evil force. The surviving nun, Sister Victoria, flees from the attacker, a demon appearing as a nun, and hangs herself. Her body is discovered by Frenchie, a villager who transports supplies to the nuns.
The Vatican sends Father Burke with Sister Irene, a nun in her novitiate, to Romania to investigate. The pair meets Frenchie, discover Victoria's body, and take a key from her corpse. Inside the abbey, they meet the Abbess, who informs them that the nuns observe silence during the night so they need to return the next day. That night, Burke is rescued by Irene after being buried alive in the graveyard by the demonic entity.
The next day, Irene and Burke return to the abbey, but only Irene can enter as it is cloistered. She meets the other nuns and learns that they are praying constantly, swapping in shifts, to keep the entity at bay. The abbey was built in the Dark Ages as a castle for the Duke of St. Carta, a powerful aristocrat obsessed with the occult. The duke summoned the demon through a rift in the catacombs but was killed by Christian knights, who sealed the rift with a vial filled with the Blood of Christ. However, the bombings during World War II reopened the rift, unleashing the entity. Burke identifies the demon as Valak and discovers the Abbess has been dead all along.
Irene is attacked by Valak and joins the nuns in prayer to ward it off. When she reunites with Burke and Frenchie, she discovers that none of the nuns she had seen and talked to were real and she had been praying alone. Sister Victoria had in fact been the last nun in that abbey and had sacrificed herself to stop Valak from possessing her.
Theorizing that Valak can only be stopped if they seal the rift again with the blood of Christ from the reliquary the same way the knights did, the trio retrieves the vial with Victoria's key. Irene asks Burke to elevate her status to a professed nun, which he does. In the tunnel, she is possessed by Valak but Frenchie smears the blood of Christ on her face, casting out the demon. Valak starts to drown her in a flooded chamber. Irene, who had kept some of Christ's blood from the vial in her mouth, spits it into the demon's face, banishing it as the rift is sealed. Frenchie resuscitates Irene and reveals his real name is Maurice. Unbeknownst to the others, during the attack, Maurice was possessed by Valak.
Twenty years later at a university seminar in Wakefield, Massachusetts, Carolyn Perron watches as Ed and Lorraine Warren present footage of their attempt to exorcise a possessed older Maurice. Maurice grabs Lorraine, showing her a vision of Ed dying, which initiates the Warrens' investigation of the Perron farmhouse haunting.
Cast
Additionally, Patrick Wilson, Vera Farmiga, and Lili Taylor appear in archive footage from The Conjuring as Ed and Lorraine Warren and Carolyn Perron, respectively.