★★★½ (out of 5) Streaming on: Max (as of 2024), also available on 4K Blu-ray and VOD. Would you like a spoiler-free guide to the film’s scariest scenes or its placement in the Conjuring timeline?

Director Michael Chaves employs a “slow dread then explosion” rhythm, but the film’s standout set piece involves a holy card that flickers into life, and a chapel where shadows move independently of their casters. The sound design is relentless: whispering Latin, the creak of a wimple turning, and Valak’s now-iconic hiss. Taissa Farmiga’s Sister Irene evolves from a traumatized novice into a full-fledged spiritual warrior. The film gives her a backstory — hints of a sainted ancestor — that verges on superhero origin, but Farmiga anchors it with vulnerable eyes and trembling hands. Her scenes opposite Storm Reid’s Debra offer a rare mentor-student dynamic in horror, questioning whether courage is born or ordained.

Here’s a feature article on the horror sequel La monja II (The Nun II), the 2023 follow-up to the 2018 Conjuring universe hit. Four years after Valak the Defiler was seemingly sealed away in a remote Romanian abbey, the demon in a nun’s habit proves that evil habits die hard. La monja II , directed by Michael Chaves ( The Curse of La Llorona ), expands the Conjuring universe with a globetrotting, Vatican-blessed nightmare that doubles down on religious horror, jump scares, and connective tissue to the main franchise. Plot: A Holy Relic, a Sinister Trail Picking up in 1956 — four years after the events of the first film — Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga) is now living a quiet life in a convent in Italy, trying to forget the trauma of the abbey. But when a priest is mysteriously immolated in a chapel in Tarascon, France, the Vatican secretly recruits Irene to investigate. The common thread? A series of violent, inexplicable deaths tied to desecrated holy sites.