The Nun in 4D: A Review
On October 30th, Erin Fenton and Scott C. Reynolds went to see The Nun in 4D. These are their reviews.
Erin’s Review
When Scott invited me to watch The Nun in 4D, I said, “That sounds expensive.” When he informed me we could get tickets for a cheap $10, I was ready to go. I love spooks and it was the day before Halloween. I may be a cheap bitch but I can spot a bargain.
Before I get into my review of The Nun in 4D, here are some other things I did to celebrate Halloween and what I graded them, so you can get a sense of how I grade things and of my personality generally.
- Walking alone in Queens at night while listening to a podcast that is just some guy reading creepypastas. Grade: A. I was spooked!
- Los Angeles’s Haunted Hayride. Grade: A. I am willing to spend $65 to wait in lines with orange lights and fog machines so actors dressed as biker clowns will jump out at me.
- Convincing my boyfriend we were going to have sex and instead just turning on “The Monster Mash.” Grade: A+. I’m still laughing at this sick prank.
Back to The Nun. The basic story: the Vatican sends a priest (Irish accent, hot, haunted by an exorcism that killed a boy) and a novitiate (inquisitive, hasn’t taken her vows, haunted by mysterious visions) to investigate the suicide of a nun in a haunted Romanian abbey with the help of the delivery man (hot, tall, has a shotgun, very sexy, haunted by the secret that he pretends to be French but is really French Canadian) who found the nun’s body. Shocker, the abbey is haunted by a demonic nun.
Scott and I met very early so we could catch up and observe the scene in general. The mood was trepidatious. A loud man on a date had not been told that the movie was 4D. “What’s the water doing?” he asked his girlfriend before turning to the audience at large. “What the fuck is the water doing? You didn’t know, either?”
It was my first 4D movie, and I was surprised to find out the seats don’t just vibrate, they really move. They shook us all around like a roller coaster. Wear a sports bra to 4D movies is my advice. There were also fans, water droplets, mist, and flashing lights. Even though the 3D version wasn’t working, the glasses they gave me were fun to fidget with.
The Nun is a cheap movie full of dumb jump scares, but everything dumb was elevated by the 4D experience. Because every jump scare came with a gust of wind and a bodily lift, the anticipation felt tenser. And once the nun appeared and dragged us deep into her haunting, we’d move and rock with wind in our faces. I grinned throughout a memorable scene of the nun-demon pulling our heroine down a hallway because it genuinely felt like being on a roller coaster.
Despite my low expectations, the script itself did a lot right! It invested in its three main characters, creating a team dynamic and a cheerful camaraderie that counteracted the grim setting. The three leads were charismatic and compelling, especially Taissa Farmiga, who broadcasts determination and alert intelligence beneath her fear. It didn’t hurt that I had crushes on all of the actors.
Moreover, The Nun had a moral center built on courage, selflessness and plain old decency. I find in a lot of these cheap ghost movies, the characters decide they need to be selfish to survive. In The Nun, our heroes repeatedly chose to face danger to save others. In the third act, our heroes have a chance to leave safely, but decline to do so in favor of facing the demon, transforming the film into a haunted action movie where instead of martial arts, they pray. The result is the rare horror movie where it’s just as fun to root for good as it is for evil.
Sure, I have quibbles. There were times when the 4D motion became a little much. Do we really need to bob back and forth as the characters ride a horse? Scriptwise, the rules of the world fell apart by tugging on any string. Nothing made sense. Characters split up for no reason at all. In an early scene, the priest is buried alive by a ghost and only narrowly survives, yet the next morning returns to the abbey seemingly no more haunted than before!
But at the end of the day, The Nun in 4D is the perfect way to spend a spooky day. Watching The Nun alone, I’d probably give it a B-. But in 4D, it’s an uncompromised Grade A. Run, don’t walk!
Erin and I had been trying to see The Nun in theaters since it came out, but life doesn’t always find a way and I thought I’d missed, which was a great tragedy, because it’s the kind of movie that deserves the respect of being experienced, not just watched, on a big screen surrounded by dozens of people whom you will come to wish would be killed by the Nun. If, as the movie claims, the good people of Romania spit when they talk about evil to ward said evil off, the average horror moviegoer will speak up during the tense parts to ward off actually experiencing the human emotions that horror is meant to evoke.
I found myself saved by a true miracle of spooky season, on All Hallow’s Eve Eve, however, when I saw that the movie was back, one showing only, in 4DX! 4DX is a Regal gimmick-slash-genius-idea wherein you eXperience a movie in all four dimensions, the fourth dimension of course being moving, rumbling seats, smells, wind, water, and fog effects.
The Four D eXperience normally sets you back about $30 a ticket, so when I saw the $10 price tag, I knew that this was fate or some nefarious force luring us to our deaths, and either way, I knew we had to go.
I was starting to think it was the latter when the movie hadn’t started 15 minutes past time, nor had the Regal pre-show been playing. Erin bravely left the theater to find an usher and I half expected her to end up floating in a nether-void, but she came back having found someone immediately. The nice man informed us that the movie would start soon but that the movie was not, despite them giving us the glasses, in 3D, which begs the question: how many Ds did we really X?
All that aside, the promo clip for 4DX was compelling enough to rank among my top ten movies all time, so I was eXcited for the main event, and the opening sequence executed the premise flawlessly: there were nuns. More than one, in fact, which is a classic underpromise/overdeliver win for The Nun.
Let’s talk about the Sister Act(ors) for a second. Vera Farmiga plays demon-battler supreme Lorraine Warren in the Conjuring cinematic universe, a role she reprises briefly in The Nun. However, it’s her sister, Taissa, who must face off with Valak in this installment, playing Sister Irene, a not-quite-a-nun herself. I spent this whole movie wondering how they were going to weave this story so that we discover that Irene is in fact Lorraine, and despite the fact that they both canonically battle the same demon and are connected to Frenchy, the real hero of the day, spoiler alert: they are not the same person. Not even related.
The Nun packs all the classic jump scares and camera movements that telegraph said jump scares, and the effect of the intensifying movement and rumbling of the seats (4DX!) serves to telegraph those even more, yet I can’t help but wonder from their reactions if literally nobody else in the audience had ever seen a horror movie before? Despite that, I think the FOUR DIMENSIONAL EXPERIENCE actually heightened the horror for me. I always know when the jump scares are coming but it’s that much more visceral when your chair pokes you and shoots a blast of canned air into your eye hole.
Truly, though, casting the younger Farmiga sister was obviously an intentional choice and yet they chose not to use it for anything meaningful? This will haunt me for years to come.
The Nun definitely hit all my horror buttons perfectly. I love creepy Catholic shit, demons, ghosts from the past that may or may not be actual ghosts, and a hellmouth that can only be opened by a blood ritual or maybe just if there’s enough of an earthquake to crack open the rocks a little, but can only be sealed by a blood ritual and not just filling in the crack with more rocks. And I love a horror movie where the characters fully think they’re in another genre. In Alien they were space truckers. In The Nun, they’re… some kind of Indiana Jones Scooby Doo Mystery Team.
Look, I can’t help but think they were fucking with us. Taissa and Vera are separated by a roughly 20 year age gap. There is a roughly 20 year gap between when we last see Taissa with Frenchy and cut directly to Vera showing off a video where she’s exorcising Frenchy. Pardon me, but Jesus Christ. Don’t do that then tell me they’re not the same person. Or even related.
All in all, the Four D XP did a great job smoothing over the rough edges left by the movie. It’s hard to be too concerned with why Chekhov’s mysterious coffin books don’t really play a part, or why a demon capable of doing any unholy thing to a human would choose to drown one by hand and be fooled by the old not-really-dead fake out. Or the order of operations of possession as pertains to your solid demon form versus the form of the human you’ve taken over. When that wind machine is blowing in your face and the chair is rumbling your bladder into a frenzy, you just don’t have time to question those things.
Especially when all you can think about is how Irene and Lorraine are close enough to make you wonder if you’ve been mis-hearing this whole time?
Anyway, I give The Nun a solid B+ but The Nun in 4DX rates 666 inverted crucifixes (out of 666).
