I feel like online discourse over the arts has been pushed to extremes. The Internet has never met an overreaction it disliked, and it has over the decades pushed opinion into the far ends without much of a middle ground left. Films, for example, are more often than not heralded as five-star masterpieces or one-star travesties, without room for the generally sensible three-star disposable entertainment. I find this is often unfair to those films that, while not exceptionally well-made or ambitious, set themselves a modest goal and quietly achieve it. Sometimes a viewer does not want to be challenged or impressed. Sometimes we just want to be nicely entertained.

Michael Chaves’ sequel The Nun II is nicely entertaining. It is based on a great piece of production design – the gauntly venomous demon Valak, it boasts a wonderful lead actor – Taissa Farmiga, and it comes with the requisite combination of slow burn scenes of creepy suspense and sudden shocks and loud noises. In a year that includes such films as Talk to Me, Godless, and New Religion it is hardly going to make a list of 2023’s best horror movies – but then why should it have to? Sometimes there is a virtue in simply being charming nonsense. It is the unhealthy but satisfying snack to Talk to Me‘s Michelin-starred feast.

The film sees Farmiga’s heavy-hearted Sister Irene get dragged from the safety of her convent to hunt down Valak (Bonnie Aarons), newly revived on the trail of a powerful Catholic relic. Irene’s hunt brings her to a Parisian boarding school, and former acquaintance Maurice (Jonas Bloquet). I will preserve the bulk of the plot to avoid spoiling any surprises, but to anyone at least broadly familiar with the horror genre there is not really anything here to spoil; it is not that kind of film.

I feel the pulp nature of The Nun and its relatively poor reputation with viewers (24% among Rotten Tomatoes voters) is robbing Bonnie Aarons of much-deserved praise. While Valak is an ominous combination of make-up and digital effects, it centres on a genuinely frightening performance. With her malevolent eyes and sadistic smile, Aarons has laid the foundation for a properly iconic horror villain. Fans should be feting her on a level with Robert Englund or Tobin Bell. It is only because she was so effective in James Wan’s The Conjuring II (2016) that there is a series of Nun films at all.

Taissa Farmiga is great as Irene, and benefits from a lot more depth and backstory than in the first Nun film. She also gets the opportunity to lead the film, rather than share a spotlight with Demián Bichir – who does not return for the sequel. Farmiga and Bloquet get some solid support from Storm Reid, Katelyn Rose Downey, and Anna Popplewell – a former child actor I last remember seeing in Disney’s Narnia films.

There is always a place on screens for a solid, creepy gothic horror story, and the elaborate trappings of Catholicism – or, let us be honest, an exaggerated pastiche of it – is readily able to inspire film after film of demons, ancient artefacts, and exorcisms. The Nun II is by no means a classic, but it’s fun. Given its improvement over its 2018 predecessor, I would be very happy to see Irene and Valak cross paths again in future.