Director – Paco Plaza, Screenplay – Jorge Gerricaechevarria & Paco Plaza, Producers – Diego Suarez Chialvo, Pablo Cruz & Enrique Lopez Lavigne, Photography – Daniel Fernandez Abello, Music – Mikel Salas, Visual Effects Supervisor – David Heras, Makeup Effects – ND Studio (Supervisor – Nacho Diaz), Production Design – Laia Ateca. Production Company – El Estudio.
Spain, 1949. Postulant nun Narcisa joins a convent to takes her vows. She is welcomed by the mother superior due to the fact that ten years earlier as a child she beheld a miracle in the village of Portoblasco. As she settles in, Narcisa finds that the monastery holds secrets as to how her predecessor Sister Ines hung herself. These lead to a mysterious game of hangman on the wall where anyone who completes it will reputedly be killed.
Paco Plaza has emerged one of the most prominent names in the modern Spanish horror film. Plaza first appeared with the horror film Second Name (2002) and then the English-language Romasanta: The Werewolf Hunt (2004). He and Jaume Balaguero gained a good deal of international attention as co-directors of the zombie Found Footage film [Rec] (2007) and its sequel [Rec] 2 (2009) and Plaza as solo director of [Rec]3: Genesis (2012) and then of Veronica (2017) and The Grandmother (2021).
Veronica was based on a supposedly true-life supernatural incident that occurred in Madrid in the early 1990s. It felt as though Plaza was trying to jump aboard the same bandwagon as The Conjuring (2013), offering up a similar film based-on-real-life paranormal events. With Sister Death, Plaza does exactly what James Wan did with The Nun (2018) and expands the franchise out to tell the backstory of the character of Sister Death (Consuelo Trujillo). The film even features an epilogue with an appearance from Sandra Escacena as Veronica and the aged version of Consuelo Trujillo.
Having watched the lame The Nun II (2023) three weeks earlier, I immediately appreciated Sister Death. It takes Paco Plaza to show us how to do a nun horror film properly. While James Wan is an exemplary director, he seems to lack the ability to impart any of his skill to the directors working on his spinoff films. If The Nun series wanted to prove their quality by several hundred percent, they should just hire Paco Plaza to make The Nun III.
Aria Bedmar as Narcisa
The Nun films feel like theatric Catholicism whose iconography has been reduced to nothing more than jumpscares and sinister imagery being made by people who have no understanding of the faith. By contrast with Sister Death, Paco Plaza feels as though he is make a Catholic horror film from the inside. It is a film where something as low key as chairs falling over and beads rolling of their own accord hold something far more spooky to them only a few minutes in than The Nun films do in their entire running time.
I enjoyed Sister Death far more so than I did Veronica. Paco Plaza pulls off some intense and eerie jumps. He even manages to make the dream scare – a thoroughly hackneyed effect to get a jump for free when it doesn’t organically exist in the plot – work for him in a scene where Aria Bedmar goes down into the kitchen at night and is given lessons in tasting pastries that suddenly turns nasty. The single eeriest scenes in the film is the one where Aria Bedmar and young Sara Roch complete the hangman and Sara keeps insisting that there is something behind Aria – a scene where Paco Plaza builds an incredible sense of dread out of there being nothing in the room.
