What is the cardinal rule of any horror film? That it needs to be scary, of course. Unfortunately, exorcist drama Dark Nuns seems to have forgotten that.

Directed by Kwon Hyuk-jae and a spin-off to The Priests, Dark Nuns follows Sister Giunia (Song Hye-kyo), an unordained nun who moonlights as an exorcist. She is one of a select group of spiritually gifted people, she is able to hear spirits and malevolent demons and feels it is her calling to help save those tormented by them. Enter Hee-joon (Moon Woo-jin), a young boy who has been possessed by a dangerous and crafty demon that Sister Giunia’s fellow priests have failed to save.

It’s up to Giunia to save the boy, and she makes it her mission to do so with the support of her fellow Sister Michaela (Jeon Yeo-been), even if those around her are determined to stop her. The concept is simple enough, exorcisms have been depicted a hundred times or more onscreen – most famously immortalised in William Friedkin’s iconic film The Exorcist – so Dark Nuns was never going to reinvent the wheel. It wasn’t even expected to be given it’s a follow up to The Priests, but couldn’t it at least have tried to make an effort?

Dark Nuns has all the hallmarks of a typical exorcism movie but doesn’t go far enough with them. Sister Giunia’s exorcism tactics are twofold: throw a bucket of holy water (literally) on Hee-joon and talk to the demon until he gives up on tormenting the poor teen. As a result they quickly become repetitive, and thus boring, because each exorcism plays out the same. Frankly, it’s no wonder it takes a whole movie before they take any effect. That’s not to say the film needed to be overly violent or gruesome, it just needed to do something, anything, to make it worth viewers’ time. 

The movie seems afraid of its own shadow, too scared to do more than the bare minimum to count as a horror movie. Perhaps this is so Dark Nuns is more of a crowd pleaser, but it seems a waste. There are a number of scenes that are prime moments for a jump scare, but they don’t come, or if they do they fall flat. The narrative itself also feels lifeless, with the cast struggling to do what they can with the stilted dialogue and wooden caricatures they’ve been asked to play. How can an audience be expected to stick out a film that promises to terrify and fails to do so time and again?

By the end the audience are as desperate as Sister Giunia for the demon to reveal his name so that she can banish him and the movie can finally be over. Though judging by the last five minutes of the film, producers are hoping to create a franchise out of these exorcists. They could well do so, but if that’s the case then they should at least make the next one scary.

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Written by Roxy Simons

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