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The foremost complaint one will probably have about The Nun II is that the title demoness is barely in it — at least not in all her deathly pale, glowy-eyed, sharp-toothed glory. She’s mostly so busy possessing the body of a classically handsome gardener named Maurice (Jonas Bloquet) that the movie might as well have been named after him and not her. 

Maurice returns from the 1952-set The Nun (2018), a barely serviceable spin-off of the Conjuring franchise in which he helped a novice, Irene (Taissa Farmiga), and a priest (Demián Bichir) as they worked to vanquish the title villain from the Romanian monastery she was terrorizing. Their efforts sort of worked: the nun, a shape-shifting demon named Valak, would indeed leave the monastery, but only after imprinting on Maurice at the last minute. (Never confirming his gestating possession outright, the movie concludes by teasing us with the image of an upside-down crucifix newly blighting the oblivious Maurice’s neck.)

The Nun II picks up four years after its predecessor. In the interim, Irene has scaled into full-fledged nunhood in Italy, the priest has been written to tragically have died of cholera so that Bichir doesn’t have to be involved in this series more than he needs to, and Maurice has been traveling around Europe unwittingly doing Valak’s bidding. The demon is going after the descendants of St. Lucy — the martyr whose eyes were infamously gouged out by pagans ahead of her execution — hoping to get her hands on said eyes to ascend to a new echelon of power. (These eyes are presumably hidden in a case somewhere, similarly to how some droplets of Jesus’ blood were carefully kept in a glass container you could wear like a necklace if you wanted in the first Nun movie.) Irene reluctantly agrees to help when guilt-tripping Catholic Church officials tap her to attempt a do-over of what she’d miraculously achieved in Romania.

Taissa Farmiga and Storm Reid. All photography courtesy of Warner Bros.

The Nun II kills much time toggling between her and disillusioned novice Debra’s (Storm Reid) ludicrously uncomplicated and quick investigation and what’s going on with Maurice. He’s landed a job at a French boarding school for girls that also conveniently has inside of it an always-locked-up chapel inevitably and regularly snuck into by misguided characters in the name of a nerve-wracking set piece. 

The toggling is watchable but generally uncompelling; the effect it has, despite the excess of jump scares, is not ratcheting-up anxiety but making us impatient for the inexorable showdown with Valak. The screenplay, by Ian Goldberg, Richard Naing, and Akela Cooper, doesn’t develop enough of a rapport between Irene and Debra to make up for the fact that neither gets a lot to do besides continually have the seemingly psychic-powered Irene be overwhelmed by a scary vision and Debra comforting her. Goings-on at the boarding school are more effective, but not by much. Those scenes mostly consist of various characters being lured somewhere they’re stupid to be curious about (e.g., dark staircases and even darker hallways) and getting either the few wits they had scared out of them or gruesomely killed altogether.

The monotonous and unnecessarily protracted The Nun II is rescued, barely, by a thankfully more inventive third act. Director Michael Chaves, who also was at the helm of the last Conjuring movie, takes creative advantage of the boarding school’s rather labyrinthine layout and focuses on several related conflicts happening at the school at once — including, with surprising success, a lightning-fast demon goat terrorizing Debra and a fleet of schoolgirls she’s attempting to protect — to ensure we’re as tensed up as we can be in a movie that hasn’t done much else besides offer quick-to-deflate jump scares and adequate Gothic style. The Nun II isn’t good enough to make a case for its own existence, but if the losing-steam Conjuring universe has proven anything since its launch a decade ago, it’s that it’s in the habit of resurrecting old foes whether or not we want to see them again.