Dark Nuns, horror, Huh Joon-ho, Jeon Yeo-been, Kwon Hyeok-jae, Lee Jin-wook, movies, reviews, Shin Jae-hwi, Song Hye-kyo, South Korea
February 26, 2025
by Carla Hay
Directed by Kwon Hyeok-jae
Culture Representation: Taking place in South Korea, the horror film “Dark Nuns” (a spinoff to the 2015 movie “The Priests”) features a predominantly white cast of Asian characters (with one white person) representing the working-class and middle-class.
Culture Clash: A nun with a troubled past tries to break into the male-dominated world of exorcists and wants to save an adolescent boy who is apparently possessed by a demon.
Culture Audience: “Dark Nuns” will appeal mainly to people who are fans of the movie’s headliners and generic horror movies about exorcisms.
Considering the numerous exorcism horror movies that already exist, “Dark Nuns” doesn’t do enough to stand out from the pack. The visual terror setups in the movie are better than the mostly underwhelming results. Although the performances in “Dark Nuns” are adequate, the story is muddled, clichéd and often very dull.
Directed by Kwon Hyeok-jae, “Dark Nuns” was written by Hyo-jin Oh and Kim Woo-Jin. The movie takes place in an unnamed city in South Korea and is a spinoff to the 2015 South Korean film “The Priests,” starring Kim Yoon-seok Gang Dong-won as exorcist priests. “Dark Nuns” begins by showing an exorcism scene where a boy named Choi Hee-joon (played by Moon Woo-jin), who is about 12 or 13 years old, is getting an exorcism done inside a church. He is tied to a wheelchair as he does the usual writhing around and hissing that possessed people do in exorcism movies.
Suddenly, a nun named Sister Giunia (played by Song Hye-kyo) bursts into the church and announces that she’s from the Liberation Order. She’s walking quickly as she carries a gas carton. Is she going to set something on fire with gas? No.
The gas carton is filled with holy water, which Sister Giunia pours on Hee-joon. She then says to the demon that she thinks has possessed Hee-joon: “You coward, taking a child’s body.”
Hee-joon is taken to a hospital, where he is put under the care of Father Paolo (played by Lee Jin-wook), who is a priest/psychiatrist. Father Paolo thinks that Hee-joon is probably mentally ill, and there could probably be a scientific/medical way to treat him. Hee-joon’s single mother keeps a vigilant watch over him.
Father Paolo is annoyed when he hears that Sister Giunia tried to perform an exorcism on Hee-joon. For starters, Father Paolo thinks the Liberation Order is a group of phony exorcists. He believes only ordained priests in Rosicrucianism can do exorcisms. Father Paolo also sternly lectures Sister Giunia by saying that he thinks Hee-joon could be faking his mental illness to cope with the bullying that Hee-joon gets at Hee-joon’s school.
The rest of the movie is essentially about Sister Giunia trying to prove that Hee-joon really is possessed by a demon and that she can legitimately get rid of the demon by performing an exorcism on him. Sister Giunia gets help from another nun named Sister Michaela (played by Jeon Yeo-been), who basically has a sidekick role in the story. Father Paolo might or might not change his opinions of Sister Giunia, but you can still easily predict Father Paolo’s story arc.
“Dark Nuns” has flashbacks to Sister Giunia’s troubled childhood, when she was orphaned at a young age. Her birth name was Kang Sung-ae. And ever since she was a little girl, she felt she was cursed. It didn’t help that when she was a child, she found a female friend hanging from a rope in an apparent suicide.
Sister Giunia has a contradictory personality: She’s determined about the future, very insecure about her past, and somewhat of blank void when it comes to the present. Even with all the flashbacks and nightmarish visions that she has in the movie, viewers will still feel like Sister Giunia is a big mystery
Other characters in the movie are three other exorcists: Father Andrea (played by Huh Joon-ho) is another priest. Hyo-won (played by Kim Gook-hee) is a rare female shaman. Ae-dong (played by Shin Jae-hwi), who was mentored by Hyo-won, stutters when he talks, but his stutter goes away when he is saying things as part of the exorcism rituals.
“Dark Nuns” mishandles the backstory of Sister Giunia by making it too vague. The flashbacks are very atmospheric, but they have no real substance and leave too many questions unanswered. Likewise, the demon’s origins are hurriedly rushed into the story when someone finds—horror movie cliché alert—an old book with ancient myths to indicate that the demon has been around for centuries. (Aren’t they all, in horror movies like this one?)
“Dark Nuns” has probably one of the most drawn-out and long-winded exorcism showdown scenes you’ll ever see, where there is too much time wasted on showing the preparation of the exorcism and then tedious scenes of Hee-joon talking like a demon. The makeup and visual effects are compentent, but a lot of “Dark Nuns” isn’t as scary as it could be.
One of the biggest flaws in the movie is that not enough is told about Hee-joon and how he could’ve ended up possessed by a demon. “Dark Nuns” also does not completely convince viewers that Sister Giunia truly cares about Hee-joon as a person, or if she just sees Hee-joon as a convenient opportunity to prove that she’s just as capable and worthy to be an exorcist as the men who dominate the exorcist profession.
Almost every exorcism movie has a big showdown scene, which is supposed to be the highlght of the film. In “Dark Nuns,” this showdown scene turns into a nonsensical mess. Without giving away too many details, one of the main characters does something that is supposed to be surprising and tragic, but it actually doesn’t ring true as something this character would do, considering what the rest of the movie showed about this character. “Dark Nuns” has all the visual elements of being an entertaining horror movie but it’s ultimately let down by an uninspired and clumsily constructed story.
Well Go USA released “Dark Nuns” in select U.S. cinemas on February 7, 2025. The movie will be released on digital and VOD on July 15, 2025. The movie was released in South Korea on January 24, 2025.