Rating: 1/5
At this point, I’ve lost count of the number of times where I’ve been left disappointed by a horror film. The standards have dropped so low that they’re offensive to your time. Unfortunately, Song Hye-kyo and Jeon Yeo-been’s supernatural horror ‘Dark Nuns’ also falls under the same spectrum.
We didn’t really need a South Korean nun thriller but we’d have been foolish not to expect one coming. The major genre has seen a new round of revival offerings in the last few years, some tolerable, most not. It’s not the first time anyone has tried to give it a twist but the question we should ask ourselves is: Do we really need it?
Some might do, but let me tell you it’s not ‘Dark Nuns.’ Crafted with no flair at this current rotten horror moment, the film isn’t genuinely frightening or interesting. It charges out of the gate to rise above, relying on cliched soundtrack stabs and not-so-thrilling jump-scares, and ultimately fails to deliver.
Song Hye-kyo plays Sister Giunia, a badass unordained nun, who smokes before facing people possessed by demons. She has a keen ear for the grotesque, knowing how to burrow her way under the skin of her character and push against the limits but that’s not enough to salvage the movie. It’s not all gory provocation because the film lacks in finding a new way into the old story about the devil. Though we get to see a bit of Shamanism along with the exorcism arc, it is nowhere close to the Korean folk practice we saw in Kim Go-eun’s ‘Exhuma’.
There is nothing scary about the demon, who is overly hyped as one of the 12 devilish manifestations, who terrorizes a young child Hee-joon (Moon Woo-jin) in this pointless horror tale. Joining Song Hye-kyo is Jeon Yeo-been’s Sister Michaela, who is still figuring out her spiritual purpose as a doctor nun in a convent gothic hospital that gives palliative care to the sick. Death is in the air in this nunsploitation but it isn’t enough to keep you hooked.
That’s not to say that ‘Dark Nuns’ doesn’t luxuriate in simple jump scares, bodily disfigurations, and the hoariest genre tropes at disposal. The problem is that these moments are more laughable than refreshing. ‘Dark Nuns’ commits the gravest sin: It is boring.
There’s nothing new here to find: We have the nuns going up against a powerful evil spirit, the exorcism, the same find the name of the devil process with a bit of shamanism touch added by Ae-dong (played by Shin Jae-hwi). So many die in this horror tale but none of the deaths leave an impact.
All the hyperbole is tasteless here. The manifestation of fear and terror in a world that feels unstable and embattled comes across as ineffective. The fact that it opts for slow-creeping dread over outright jump scares, though there are a couple of those thrown in, still makes it not chilling.
Final thoughts:
At times ‘Dark Nuns’ looks eerily beautiful in its gothic gloom and viewers may tend to be taken aback by its gruesomely staged scenes. But its weakness is in not trusting this strong visual sense of itself, instead falling back on clumsy exposition that undermines it. Good acting, yet it is nowhere near ingenious or exciting enough to rival its obvious contemporaries like ‘Exhuma’ in Korea or ‘Sister Death’ elsewhere in the world.
This tiresome horror-thriller preens itself on an old formula and the outcome is more pointless than ever. Here it lumbers into view, an unforgivably dull piece of product that should never have been made. ‘Dark Nuns’ is not only struggling to be scary but it’s struggling for purpose and meaning and maybe in theatres, audiences too.
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