I'm not sure how big a holiday Lunar New Year is in South Korea; certainly AMC decided it's not a particularly big deal in Boston. We don't have a Koreatown like we do a Chinatown, and time was i'd have to go to Revere to see a Korean movie, but on the other hand the closest Newbury Comics to this theater has a big K-Pop section, so maybe the audience is growing more than the one show a day this is getting. At least it's at a decent time as opposed to 3pm.
I do kind of wonder if I would have seen this movie - and even tried to track down the one to which it is a sequel! - if it weren't Korean. I'm not really that big a fan of religious horror, and generally skip Western movies about exorcisms, but I apparently can't let this go by.
(Amusingly, "I'm not really a big fan of religious horror" is something I said to my nieces at Christmas, and for all that seeing them grow up reminds me I'm old, it is also very fun to be able to talk about horror movies with your nieces!)
Geomeun sunyeodeul (The Priests 2: Dark Nuns)
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 7 February 2025 in AMC Cuaseway #4 (first-run, laser DCP)
buy the first film on DVD at Amazon
A question I often have when watching Korean exorcism movies involving the Catholic church is "why are you doing this when you could be making Exhuma?", although it obviously got easier to articulate when that film came out. The irony in this question, of course, is that the Catholic material probably carries the same thrill of discovery in Korea that shamanism has here in the U.S. The opening credits have definitions of relatively basic information (for Westerners), after all. Still, I can't help but feel that this movie seems most alive when it's closer to its local roots than its Roman ones.
The film opens with Kang Sung-ae, aka Sister Junia (Song Hye-kyo) arriving at the site of an exorcism with a huge jerry-can of holy water and more confidence than the priests involved, and soon setting sights on a new target: Choi Hee-joon (Moon Woo-jin), a pre-teen boy under observation at the Catholic hospital who is clearly possessed to Junia, but attending physician Father Paolo (Lee Jin-wook) may be a priest but doesn't really believe in demonic possession, with protegé Su-young, aka Sister Michela (Jeon Yeo-bin) echoing his point of view. Junia knows that Michela is maybe not so skeptical as she appears, and soon has her assisting in her attempt to free the boy from what may be one of the "12 Manifestations".
I'm not a particular fan of this particular slice of the horror genre, in part because I am not religious . It's not so much that I don't believe demons are real, but because I don't find anything resonant in a story where a demon is just a demon, and that's what Dark Nuns winds up being: Once Hee-joon's mother exits the story, he's not connected to anything bigger, and it makes the story kind of procedural, but the procedures seem arbitrary. The demon possessing Hee-joon doesn't feel like it's connected to any sort of real-world horror, and the film is only occasionally interested in what fighting it means to the SIsters, which could be a pretty good story, with plenty of material about how the Church is not built to let these highly-capable women have the authority they'd give less-able men.
Indeed, when the film is at its best, it's because Song Hye-kyo and Jeon Yeo-bin have enjoyable chemistry on-screen. Song's Junia is impatient, smoking too much and dumping gallons of holy water when most priests will flick a few drops, not looking to waste her numbered days; Jeon's Michela has a sweet tooth and is clearly the result of being close to the supernatural but wanting to help in grounded ways. Even if nuns weren't called "sisters", there's an enjoyable big-sis/little-sis vibe to them. Male priests drift in and out of the story making minor impressions, but I could watch a whole movie full of scenes where Michela has bought an extra soda for Junia who only drinks it because it's a non-smoking area. Props to Moon Woo-jin as the possessed kid, though - he goes hard when the time comes.
That's mostly the back half of the movie, which feels like director Kwon Hyeok-jae and writer Kim Woo-jin took a bunch of scenes from other horror movies and glued them together whether or not they really made sense together. They commit to the bit enough to make the finale propulsive, but the action itself is more about evoking a familiar feeling rather than connecting things. Why is the final exorcism in this industrial plant? No really compelling reason. Michela's flashbacks and the time she sees a ghost? Not useful. All those rats? Not a big deal. Wait, is it important to get Hee-joon to a church or just to ring the bell? Kwon executes each bit well enough and isn't bad at connecting them, but what's it add up to?
Of course, it probably also doesn't help that the script has to contort itself so badly to get the situation it wants that Junia and Mikela often seem as frustrated with the writers as the bureaucracy they've created. What do you mean, the heroes of 2015's The Priests are out of the country and, no, we can't say what they're doing or bring them or any dedicated exorcists from the Vatican even though it's a Duke of Hell and not just some minor demon possessing Hee-Joon! Oh, and all the Korean shamans are busy today because there's an election (which itself might be a fun bit but is just here so Michela can snort "really?"). When a movie requires the writers to avoid so much, maybe they shouldn't be writing that particular movie. Also, I don't know if this is just awkward subtitling, but there's a weird fixation on Junia's uterus that only Song Hye-kyo seems to recognize as creepy and insulting; her facial expressions are the only acknowledgment of this being uncomfortable.
Mostly, though, it's blandly familiar without a real story hook. It feels like the studio decided it wanted a sequel or spin-off of The Priests, and someone came up with the nuns as an interesting angle, but nobody came up with something to put underneath the well-executed surface in order to make it hit home.
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