Reviewed by Alicia Glass
A pair of troubled nuns, each with haunted pasts, work desperately to save a young boy possessed by an evil spirit.
Okay, this is a highly convoluted one y’all, and must be taken with a bunch of grains of salt. The movie is set in South Korea in 2024, featuring an non-ordained nun from an unrecognized order, Sister Junia (Song Hye-kyo), her reluctant and haunted by her cursed past sister nun, Sister Michaela (Jeon Yeo-been), and a fellow priest you may recognize from the much more bloody series Squid Game, Father Paolo (Lee Jin-wook), who also happens to be a doctor. And the boy they’re all trying to save from demonic possession, Hee-joon (Moon Woo-jin).
The film attempts to set up a lot of strange precedents, one of the foremost being that the Catholic church has an order known as the Rosicrucians, an exorcism group created by the Vatican to combat the evil spirits, called by them the 12 manifestations.
Sister Junia is quite a character herself – she smokes like a chimney, carries around full gas cans of holy water like a combat weapon, and is pretty well aware she’s suffering from cancer of the lady-parts, which is a true irony given she’s a nun and has never had, nor will she ever have, children. Sister Junia has friends among the shaman community of South Korea, one friend in particular from her past who has now more or less embraced the shaman way of life, and is willing to try and help Hee-joon when Sister Junia brings the boy to see her. As it turns out, the stuttering boy her shaman friend has in her employ will be of far more help than the shaman herself could be.
Sister Michaela conversely, shrinks from her cursed past, where she sees ghosts and dark spirits, even from young girlhood. She dabbles in tarot cards as a method to try and understand her ghostly visions, which is considered a huge no-no here in the West, as tarot is associated with all things witchcraft and forbidden magic. There is actually a scene in the movie where Sister Michaela attempts to explain how the tarot deck she uses has churchly imagery and meaning, and it’s a little hard for the viewers to accept such a provocative assertion. But rather than being associated with witchcraft and the like, Dark Nuns seems to view the tarot cards as being like shaman paper talismans, which actually makes a bit more sense within the context of the movie.
Father Paolo on the other hand, he may be a priest sure, but he’s also a doctor, and he swears up down and sideways that there is no such thing as demonic possession, just the troubled mental state of weak-minded people, coupled with various external but still human influences. He does come through towards the end though, after witnessing Hee-joon’s internal torture and Sister Junia’s absolute determination to save him, even at the cost of her life and potentially her immortal soul, Father Paolo girds his vestments and takes at least part in the unofficial exorcism they finally got permission for.
Like the infamous masterpiece that kicked off many viewers fascination with demonic possession, the original Exorcist film from 1973, it takes a whole lot of to-ing and fro-ing, soul-searching and hierarchy-climbing, for us to finally get to the real meaty part of the film, the exorcism rite itself. The inclusion of other belief practices and faiths leads credence to the oft-discussed idea that all cultures and religions have some manner of demonic or evil spirit possession and some kind of rite or ritual to remove said parasite from the possessed person. And so long as you come together with pure intention, with true faith to try and help said possessed person, the ritual trappings that vary from culture to culture don’t actually have to matter. That, in the end, was how Sister Junia, with help from many varied sources, beat the demon beast from one of the 12 manifestations. How she got there though, the methods employed by various allies and oppositions, is up for interesting debate.
Grab your gas can of holy water to go see Dark Nuns, in select theaters now!