Produced by Brian Yuzna's Fantastic Factory, an outfit that specializes in genre fare and shoots the majority of their material in Spain (you'll know them from Faust, Dagon and Rottweiler) and written by Jaume Balaguero (the man who penned both Darkness and The Nameless, two very solid recent Spanish horror film), The Nun is kind of a mixed bag, but not one that's completely without some worth.

Back in the late seventies a few girls went to a Catholic boarding school somewhere in Spain. While they were there, complications arose and an extremely vindictive and fanatical nun wound up dead after trying to 'purify' one of the girls for reasons that aren't made clear until later in the film but which are pretty easy to figure out if you pay attention. At any rate, eighteen years later and someone or something seems to be haunting these girls, now grown women, who are going to be reuniting at the old school in Spain to try and figure out what they can do to stop these murders before all taken down for good.

While all of this is going on, a girl named Eva (Anita Briem) is living it up with her friends at their graduation party. They all get a little tipsy but nothing bad happens, at least not until Eva goes home and sees her mother having her throat slit by a ghostly looking figure in a black gown that looks eerily close to, you guessed it, a nun! She gets over her mother's death pretty quickly and finds that she'd purchased a plane ticket to go to Spain. Thankfully for Eva, who is good friends with a Spanish exchange student who is heading home for the summer, she's able to use that ticket herself and of she goes with her Spanish friend and her boyfriend, a dork with a penchant for videotaping everything, to Spain.

When they get there, Eve meets a nice young man who is currently studying for the priesthood named Gabriel (Manu Fullola). With his help, Eva and her friends are able to find the old boarding school, which was shut down eighteen years ago, and meet up with her mother's former classmates but soon enough, that ghastly figure appears and one by one starts killing everyone off…

First things first, Luis De La Madrid, in his directorial debut, has done a really decent job with the pacing of this film. It starts off strongly enough to keep your attention and while the plot does get a little muddy towards the end, there are a few nice little twists in here (some of which are obvious, some not so obvious) to keep you guessing even if the execution leaves a little to be desired in spots. The movie also looks really good – there's oodles of atmosphere and lots of damp, moist style in the film that works well in its favor and ensures that even when we're scratching out heads towards the end, at least The Nun looks cool

The titular nun herself is also a really neat creation. The first time we see her manifest on screen, it is genuinely scary. Almost completely rendered in CGI, the nun is able to move fast, through walls and through people even, coming up out of the water and looking freaky every time without fail. More often than not CGI tends to really suck the life out of a monster but not here, in fact, this is one of those rare exceptions where the computer generated beastie works really well.

The problems with The Nun come from the characters and some of the plot elements. First of all, there's the camcorder guy – he makes references to Final Destination and The Blair Witch Project I suppose to make us think he's hip but really, we just want the nun to get him first. He's annoying and we see too much of the movie through his camcorder viewfinder. The Spanish exchange student doesn't fare much better. Sure she's cute to look at and her accent is adorable but the reality of the situation is she has no development whatsoever and we could care less about her because of that. Eva is at least sympathetic, but again, she gets over her mother's death so quickly without even really mourning that it's hard to grasp the impact of the event, particularly as foreshadowing of what is to come.

Logic gaps and dumb characters aside, however, this one is worth a look. It's not a classic by any stretch but if you can get past the boneheaded moves that the walking cliché characters make you're left with a slick looking movie with a few inventive (and gory!) kill scenes, some refreshingly dark imagery, and a few intriguing twists.

Video:

The 2.35.1 anamorphic widescreen on this disc is pretty nice despite some shimmering in a few scenes. Black levels stay strong throughout, only showing mpeg compression in a couple of spots (which is good seeing as so much of the film takes place at night or in dark places – at least three quarters of the film). Flesh tones look lifelike and natural, and the moody lighting used in the finale comes through nicely on this transfer. There's a pretty decent level of both foreground and background detail present in the image pretty much throughout the movie though some fine detail does get lost in the shadows from time to time but thankfully this only happens sporadically and it isn't a regular occurrence. Overall though, The Nun does look pretty good on this DVD.