Movie Nation

I’m hard-pressed to think of a screen role Aaron Eckhart didn’t commit to, heart and soul. A-pictures and B-movies, bit parts or leads, he’s present, prepped and accounted for every time somebody yells “Action!”

For his latest, he’s hit the gym, mastered a faint drawl and studied that confused, punch-drunk look of a veteran fighter whose memory and very consciousness comes and goes as he staggers towards 50. Stoop-shouldered, he leans so far into his gait that it’s like he’s stalking a foe, or about to fall down in the process. It’s a lovely, lived-in performance.

“Rumble Through the Dark” is a Bayou brawler noir, a film about a back alley fighter who never really “put on the gloves.” Anybody who keeps brass knuckles in his pocket isn’t a “boxer,” and probably never was going to be.

Jack Boucher’s last name isn’t the only source of his nickname. “The Butcher” the Cajuns and their neighbors call the guy with the French surname to suit his profession. Jack makes a mess out of his foes, except when he’s paid to take a dive. And even then, he makes a punishing show of it, making them pay to “fix” the fight.

Jack’s in hock to the madam and bookie they call Big Momma because of course they do. Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who broke through with Mike Leigh’s “Secrets & Lies” nearly 30 years ago, brings a world weary/worldwise menace to a character others speak of warily, as she has a habit of branding a “$” sign on those who owe her money.

Jack fights and he gambles. He wakes up and passes back out again. He’s spending an awful lot of time trapped in memories of childhood abandonment, experiencing flashbacks of the stepmother who took him in and who taught him to stand up to bullies with extreme prejudice.

In Louisiana, having a “lesbian mom” is going to get you teased. Got to be tough to deal with that.

Just as Jack thinks he’s going to get square with Big Momma thanks to a lucky turn or ten of the roulette wheel, he loses the cash. Annette the Tattoo’d (fleshy, inked-up Bella Thorne) lady in a traveling carnival is the one who finds his winnings.

Filmmaking siblings Graham and Parker Phillips take their movie’s sweet time getting the carny with the cash and “lots of questions” in the same truck with the bloodied, broke brawler who might have the answers.

Yes, their picture dawdles. They give screen time for supporting players like Ritchie Coster, as Baron, who runs the seedy carnival, Mike McColl as a greedy carny/mechanic and Christopher Winchester, as Big Momma’s muscle, to make their marks.

And they give Jean-Baptiste almost all the best lines.

“I wish you knew how bad I wanna put you outta your misery.” Fight or don’t fight. You might get hurt if you do, you WILL get hurt if you don’t.”

“I can’t figure out whether you’re gettin’ braver or dumber.” To her, he’s just a guy prone to “rumble through the dark, chasin’ something he ain’t never gonna catch.”

The Phillips (“The Bygone” was theirs) allow director of photography David J. Myrick the time to light for mood — gloom, poverty, downmarket despair — and compose one immaculate shot after another. This modestly-budgeted indie is so gorgeous to look at you hope Martin Scorsese doesn’t see it. “Killers of the Flower Moon” has the air of a movie shot on a cell phone by comparison.

That “dawdling” thing gets in the way of this simple, sometimes trite and even corny narrative. This is a B-movie by genre — a “Big Fight” picture — by tropes and by design. Yet the Phillips never let a single spare scene get across a plot point when five long, often wordless and evocative ones will do.

But it’s never less than watchable. And Eckhart rewards the obvious care and time it takes to make a film look this polished, gritty and immersive by giving these young filmmakers every penny’s worth in every take. Thorne makes the most of a role that’s downmarket, but sentimental.

And Jean-Baptiste takes a stereotypical character and makes her pop off screen, playing a woman with agency, an eye for spectacle, an unforgiving streak and a branding iron she’s not shy about heating up when the need or the sadistic urge arises.

Rating: R, grisly, graphic violence, profanity, smoking

Cast: Aaron Eckhart, Bella Thorne, Ritchie Coster, Christopher Winchester, Mike McColl and Marianne Jean-Baptiste.

Credits: Directed by Graham Phillips and Parker Phillips, scripted by Michael Farris Smith. A Lionsgate/Screen Media release.

Running time: 1:54

“Sayen: Desert Road (Sayen: La Ruta Seca)” is a Chilean B-movie thriller about the further adventures of activist/investigator and freedom fighter Sayen, a two-fisted Mapuche woman plunging into a Big Conspiracy destroying her people and and enriching the corrupt in her native Chile.

We met the title character, played by Indigineous action heroine Rallen Montenegro, in “Sayen,” the story of how she was radicalized when murderous multinational corp-hired goons killed her wise grandmother, sending the title character on a quest for revenge and justice.

“Desert Road” has her breaking and entering, torturing, fighting and digging her way towards the top of this water-stealing, lithium-minining, politician-buying pyramid. She is a woman who has shaved her head to show us how serious she is on this mission. She has her grandmother’s spirit, embodied in an Andean Condor, to guide her.

Sayen has been labeled a “terrorist” by the compliant media, which buys into the spin that GreenCorp, its villainous boss Maximo Torres (Enrique Arces) and bought-and-paid-for Chilean senator (Alfredo Castro) are putting out there. Disappearances and murders are laid at her feet, not theirs.

Hunted and hounded by company muscle, chased on foot, motorcycle and ATV through the Atacama Desert, she relies on her native wits, stamina and fighting skills to save her.

There is help along the way — her Mapuche researcher friend Jose (Camilo Arancibia) is back from the first film. Another woman, Quimal (Katalina Sánchez) pitches in on getting Sayen safe houses and getaways as she sniffs around for the truth.

The villains call her “the Indian” (“dusky woman,” in Spanish, but this is dubbed on Amazon) as she tries to foil their plans for sucking up the desert’s aquifer to mine lithium for the batteries that will power the “green” or at least “greener” future.

Director Alexander Witt’s sequel never feels like anything more than a placeholder film for I guess a third installment in this trilogy.

The action beats are solid, but character development is pared down from the introductory film. Unseen third act “allies” and the elusive, still unseen Mr. Big (Fisk) are hinted at.

But for everything resolved here — and precious little is — more that must be resolved in the finale is introduced and left hanging.

The dialogue, situations and heavies are B-movie formulaic and utterly unsurprising.

Montenegro helps make Sayen a compelling character with an unusual, seldom-filmed point of view. But the movie pulls her punches. I’d love to see her as a more ruthless avenger, frankly.

In any event, if all involved were hoping they’d serve up enough to keep viewers interested enough to await the third film in this saga, they failed.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Rallen Montenegro, Enrique Arce, Katalina Sánchez, Camilo Arancibia, Eyal Meyer and Alfredo Castro

Credits: Directed by Alexander Witt, scriped by Leticia Akel and Paula del Fierro. An MGM/Amazon Prime Video release.

Running time: 1:33

It was never going to be pretty.

“Five Nights at Freddy’s” set all sorts of records on its opening weekend, blowing up to a Halloween Eve $80 million take that told us

It has a huge teen fanbase and they were masterfully hyped into a frenzy to see it by Universal.

Reviews were bad to brutal, and if nothing else, they foretell of a steep falloff once the fans — enthusiastic as they were — have seen it. Once or twice, in many cases.

Box Office Pro was projecting a $25 million second weekend, “Tyler Perry plunge” steep in and of iteself. The Numbers was figuring $29 million.

But Deadline.com crunched the Friday numbers and all but buried the “news” that Freddy’s is going straight over a cliff. $17 ($19.3 is the Sunday update) million? I guess the Freddy’s folks aren’t Swiftie loyal. That’s damned near 80% lower than it opened if that holds true over the weekend.

Yes, they did day and date with Peacock streaming, so it’s all found money. But that’s not pretty, anyway you slice it. So Deadline didn’t to soften the blow by writing a “Didn’t they market this crap beautifully?”

It’s also possible Deadline’s projections are way off. BO Pro and The Numbers certainly think so.

“Killers of the Flower Moon” will put Apple in a happy place thanks to it clearing the $100 million mark at the global box office before it streams on Apple TV+. It is set to clear another $7 million this weekend, pushing it over the $50 million mark at the domestic box office.

That won’t be good enough for second place, which will be held by “Taylor Swift–The Eras Tour,” which is projected to manage $13.5 even as it fades to black, and it will end up over $162 million by midnight Sunday.

That “After Death” documentary is still doing brisk business, another $2-3 million coming its way.

There are three new wide (ish) releases opening — Sofia Coppola’s pointed, believable but chilly and superficial “Priscilla” is going to do over $2 million. Meg Ryan’s directed and stars-in rom-com “What Happens Later,” with David Duchovny, could clear $1.

I keep poking Bleecker Street as “the witness protection program of film distribution,” as their movies aren’t so much released as smuggled into theaters, daring you to find them. I knew this was coming, but not exactly when. They didn’t pitch or push this to most critics, and they can’t be shocked when it bombs.

Maybe “The Marsh King’s Daughter” will clear $1 million, on just over 1,000 screens. Maybe not. Decent picture. Probably deserves better, certainly worthy of cracking the top ten.

As always, I’ll be updating these figures as more data comes in over the weekend.

Before the words “cultural appropriation” and Western filters through which to view the “exotic East” fell out of fashion, the TV version of James Clavell’s epic novel “Shogun” was a major mini-series event of the TV of 1980.

Mini series romantic lead Richard Chamberlain starred alongside the iconic Toshirô Mifune. Yôko Shimada, Michael Hordern, Vladek Sheybal and the larger than life John Rhys-Davies were also stars of that nine hour TV event.

Hulu is taking a fresh look at the material, using Clavell’s novel for only part of the story (per IMDb), some of the main characters, etc. This Feb. streaming event — 10 episodes long — is built around the formidable Hiroyuki Sanada, Anna Sawai and Cosmo Jarvis — a more recognizable Japanese cast this time, with the colorful Portugeuse Captain Rodrigues turned into a Jesuit priest this time — there really is no John Rhys-Davies replacement floating around the profession these days.

Karen Dionne’s Crimson Scribe-award winning, best-selling novel “The Marsh King’s Daughter” earns a sturdy, suspenseful big screen treatment by the director of “The Illusionist” and “The Upside.”

Neil Burger benefits from having a compelling lead — Daisy Ridley — and one of the Best Villains of Our Time, Ben Mendelsohn, as her antagonist teacher/father, a back-to-the-woods murderer and kidnapper.

If the story feels cinematically familiar, perhaps you’re thinking of “Where the Crawdads Sing” when you’re also remembering “Leave No Trace.” A child, brought up Davey Crockett style, “raised in the woods so’s (she) knew every tree,” finds herself calling on that knowledge when tested by a life-and-death situation that also reveals much about the woodsman who raised her.

We meet Helena when she’s ten, growing up off the grid in the wilds of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Helena, played by Brooklynn Prince (“The Florida Project”) at this age, is an impressionable Daddy’s girl who skips homeschooling and housework with mom (Caren Pistorious) for any chance to wander the woods with Dad.

Father Jacob is a gentle but unsentimental teacher and taskmaster.

“If you were afraid, running for your life, where would you go?” “Where no one could see me.”

Giving her the shot at a deer they’ve been stalking makes her ask, “What if I miss?” “Then we go hungry tonight.”

A hungry mother wolf eyes her as the meal she might very well be and earns Father’s sternest lesson.

“You must always protect your family.”

These often wordless reveries in the woods come with a lesson, and often with a test. Pass or fail, “Little Shadow” earns a Native style tattoo about the experience from her dad.

And then the day comes when she might start to figure things out, why her mother is so unhappy and distressed, why her father gets rough with her. A stranger sees them and that triggers a getaway. Mom has to blurt out “I was kidnapped” and incapicate the confused and furious child to escape the marksman/monster who has held them both captive.

Years pass, and Helena (Ridley) has a little girl of her own, a college professor husband (Garrett Hedlund), a Jeep XJ, cinematically appropriate transportation for a U.P. college professor’s family and an anonymous life in the same corner of the world where she grew up.

Even her husband doesn’t realize she’s the notorious “Marsh King’s Daughter.” And then the Marsh King busts out of prison.

Burger and screenwriters Elle Smith and Mark L. Smith abandon some of Dionne’s novelistic devices, giving “Him” and “The Daughter” names straight away, etc.

The story’s contortions to avoid being predictable often come to naught in the film, as there’s only path this tale can take and still deliver something like “The Hollywood Version.” But Burger & Co. maintain suspense and make us guess at how far they’ll take things, as a coyote who chews off his own leg is laid out as allegorical foreshadowing and the ultimate endorsement of the father’s “There’s nothing more pure than the instinct to survive” lesson.

Ridley is properly alarmed, brave and stoic as Helena. The accent may not be “U.P.” if there is such a thing. But she’s credibly American and properly rawboned, woodlore competent and understandably secretive. Gil Birmingham stands out as the sheriff who had a hand in “rescuing” Helena and her mother, and became a big part of her life. Hedlund makes do with a largely thankless role, a husband with no “agency” in his wife’s severest trial.

But this is Mendelsohn’s movie. Whenever he goes a stretch without playing a big screen heavy, it just underscores how good he is at it when he returns to the Dark Side. Here, his father-figure is a man of mystery. We don’t know how he came to be the woodlands incel who kidnapped a woman and raised a daughter to be just like him.

Mendelsohn makes us believe in this roughhewn Jacob every second he’s on the screen. We don’t need to know his back story. He just “is.” Never over-the-top, always cold-blooded and rational, this is a role all but novelized with Mendelsohn in mind.

The predictability of much of what we see unfold here isn’t an asset. “Marsh King’s Daughter” can feel perfunctory, lacking the interior life that a novel gives characters. But the settings, the striking cinematography, sharp, suspense-heightening editing of the action beats and the stars lead this Marsh King’s Daughter out of the swamp.

Rating: R, violence

Cast: Daisy Ridley, Ben Mendelsohn, Gil Birmingham, Brooklynn Prince, Caren Pistorious and Garrett Hedlund.

Credits: Directed by Neil Burger, scripted by Elle Smith and Mark L. Smith, based on the novel by Karen Dionne. A Lionsgate/Roadside Attractions release.

Running time: 1:48

I HATE Bon Jovi. Just...hate.

But there’s something kinda right about using a Pop Hair Metal (shudder) Hall of Famers’ tune to score this action comedy reboot of the ’80s TV series about a stunt man who hustles a little “fixer” and retrieval and detective work on the side.

Cheese on cheese, amIright?

It looks and sounds big and stupid. And that damned Emily Blunt has chemistry with EVERYbody.

March 1.

“Fingernails” is a romantic curiosity with a touch of sci-fi, a film that puts The Observer Effect in a human relationships context. That’s the physics phenomenon/theory that you change something merely by the act of studying or “observing” it.

This Christos Nikou tale imagines a not-really-alternate reality in which loneliness has reached the “crisis” stage, science has allegedly discovered a chemical compatibility test that requires a full, yanked-out fingernail to be processed and two co-workers at a counseling “Love Institute” start to wonder if they’re with Mr. or Ms. Right, thanks to mutual attraction, no matter what science tells them.

Can “true love” be tested by yanking and cooking fingernails? Can any romance stand up to cold, hard scientific or pseudo scientific scrutiny?

It’s the sort of movie you get when an off-center Greek filmmaker co-writes and shoots an Anglo-American produced romance in the overcast fall of Ontario. It’s just a tad…off.

Only the players give it any hint of warmth or heart, because this dry-to-the-point-of-parched “love story” is hellbent on avoiding that.

Jessie Buckley stars as Anna, a school teacher who some while back “tested positive” with her longtime beau, Ryan (Jeremy Allen White). But as their relationship has settled into routine, he feels the freedom to unemotionally note anything he doesn’t like. And when he’s not around, she’s free to admit that she’s “sacrificing” little things about herself to indulge him.

They mix and mingle with other couples, the “tested” and the untested. Although the movie limits this alternate reality by leaving out all of the reasons for our global epidemic of loneliness and romantic ennui — “media” is limited to nature documentaries and old movies, “social” media apparently doesn’t exist — Nikou immerses us in a world of brittle relationships and the fragile people trapped in them, or struggling to find one that “tests positive.”

Anna’s journey truly begins when she abandons her chosen profession for a job at The Love Institute, whose founder (Luke Wilson) wants to go beyond the breakthrough fingernail-testing that takes “the risk out of love” and do therapy and exercises with couples that “make the bond of love stronger.”

The “tests” would be amusing bits of comic quackery in another filmmaker’s hands. The “smell” test has couples urged not to bathe for a day or two, show up, strip to their underwear and wear a blindfold to discover if they can work the room, and sense their beloved through smell.

Underwater “one minute of eye contact” while holding one’s breath in a pool? Measuring partners’ reactions to “Notting Hill” in a local cinema (with Our Founder wanting to amp that up by staging a fake fire in the theater to gauge reactions and whether or not partners put their lovers ahead of themselves) is another.

Tandem skydiving? Sure

But Anna is paired-up with the cynical, wry trainer Amir, who seems to see through the crackpottery of it all. He notes precautions to take with the underwater exercise.

“Don’t want anyone dying on us...again.”

As Anna loves to ask people about their romances, their “how you met” stories, Amir invents a corny one about how he met his Natasha, and admits the joke. Because that’s what cynics do.

We can see Anna break out in Buckley’s adorable crooked smile, the spark between them as they work with inspiringly-devoted young lovers and worrisome, untested other couples. And that’s contrasted with the drab, incurious love life Anna faces at home at the end of every day.

She even tries to trick Ryan into taking this or that test, a trite sitcom plot device, but at least one that promises something lighter.

But Nikou — you just knew a “Dogtooth” trained Greek whose quirky first film was titled “Apples” was going to make a movie for Apple — isn’t having it. There’ll be little lightness here, and when there is, it’s as if he resents having to include it.

The entire production feels a tad stiff, as if he’s scientifically market-tested how he can approach this (a LATE third act single moment inclusion of a same-sex couple) and just checking off boxes along the way, making a movie that feels like a product of the alternate reality he’s presenting.

But Buckley, of “Lost Child” and “Wild Rose,” and Ahmed (“Sound of Metal,” “Nightcrawler”) make the characters more interesting than the scripted story they appear in. There is a hint of romantic warmth here, and it all comes from them.

Rating: R, a bit of violence, profanity

Cast: Jessie Buckley, Riz Ahmed, Jeremy Allen White and Luke Wilson

Credits: Directed by Christos Nikou, scripted by Christos Nikou, Sam Steiner and Stavros Raptis. An Apple TV+ release.

Running time: 1:53

That critic’s rule that you’ve got to meet every film on something resembling its own terms in order to give it a fair shot gets a severe test with “Love Virtually,” an indie action rom/com that’s part live-action, part CGI simulated “VR” avatars and their lives of digital desperation.

With a narrative, characters and dialogue that lurch between “inside gaming” jokes and jargon and flippant “old folks” reactions and responses to it, it never congeals into anything one would care to embrace, even if we could find something to grab hold of. But “Love Virtually” — the title’s a pun on “Love, Actually” — is an interesting indie cinema exercise, a failure that might have a natural audience in midnight showings at online gaming conventions, or streamed at “virtual” versions of such things.

As the pandemic rumbles on, this obsessed gamer who goes by “Roddy Danger” (Peter Gilroy) is too distracted to hang onto his virtual and real-life girlfriend Kimberly (Paige Mobley) and finds himself frantic to win her back in VR.

His cheat code to that might be via her just-“canceled” “Beverly Hills Bitches” influencer/cousin Clarissa (Nikki Howard), who has her own problems thanks to posting a paid endorsement of a “mud mask” beauty product the day the rest of America was posting the same black square to show solidarity with Black Lives Matter as the George Floyd murder protests were ramping up.

Clarissa’s therapist (Cheri Oteri) might have words of advice. But she’s also distracted, having a virtual affair with some avatar who could very well be her therapist husband (Stephen Tobolowsky) in disguise.

Then there’s the V-ball (virtual hoops) star La Monte (Vincent Washington) who got canceled for cavalierly infecting half the NBA by mocking the virus as he touched a bunch of microphones (Helllooo Rudy Gobert) whose agent Barry (Ryan O’Flanagan) is dealing with that, Daddy issues and a neglected girlfriend (Ksenia Valenti) who takes up with an AI “Chatbot” Paul F. Tompkins) in revenge.

Hapless Roddy has one last shot at winning Kimberly back from his nemesis, successful gamer Kalvin Kluck (director and co-writer L.E, Staiman). That will have to happen at the exclusive virtual Club Kaboom, where all our characters are headed as this picture makes that its destination where every storyline is to be resolved.

A kid gaming savant, murderous Russian hackers, assorted single scene nerds and other subplots clutter this 85 minute movie’s script and make it all too easy to say “Who cares about ANY of them/ANY of this?”

The film’s obvious issue is its budget, but that relates to how hackneyed the situations are and how thinly drawn the character “types” turn out to be.

Throw a lot of money at this and you’d get bigger name actors. But as they’re mostly seen in VR, what would be the point? Sell the script to a big distributor and they’d rewrite it completely to try and excise the most trite elements.

But the sight gags and joke-packed dialogue have their moments.

“The Dark Web? Is that a Black Lives Matter thing?”

“Stop being such a little girl!” agent Barry’s macho/closeted dad (Tom Virtue) barks. “You’re like Timothee Chalamet in ‘Little Women!'”

Roddy met Kimberly as he virtually rescued her from a virtual slip-and-fall accident at the virtual “Hole Foods” supermarket.

Etc.

Generously meeting this mess on its “own terms” leads to the judgment that there’s an idea or two here that might find a better home in a better script with a bigger budget.

Rating: unrated, VR/CGI simulated violence, date rape, sex, gunplay

Cast: Peter Gilroy, Cheri Oteri, Paige Mobley, Vincent Washington, L.E. Staiman, Ryan O’Flanagan, Harper Frawley and Stephen Tobolowsky.

Credits: Directed by L.E. Staiman, scripted by Cheston Mizel and L.E. Staiman. A Premiere Digital release.

Running time: 1:24

There’s something disturbing about the way Eisenberg bulks up and does a whole testonery turn — like his alter ego Mark Zuckerberg — in this part.

Zuck, the “Social Network” inventor, went through that and took walking potatocake Elon Musk’s offer to brawl for…Charity, was it? Nah. That doesn’t sound “on brand” for either of those two.

In any event, it’s like Eisenberg is channeling a broke and expectant father version of Zuckerberg in this “Fight Club” ish riff.

Now here’s Eisenberg as we’ve never seen him before, emasculated and kind of given some of that back by a very cultish Oscar winner, Adrien Brody.

Nov. 17, Lionsgate unleashes “Manodrome.”

As it closes in on 100 years since the Spanish Civil War, Spanish cinema is still debating the conflict, its lasting scars and the Catholic Church’s role in it — as victim of “leftist” reprisals, or as an authoritarian religion aligned with other authoritarians — fascists, monarchists and the like.

“Sister Death” is an interesting Civil War-related attempt at back-engineering a prequel to the teen-haunted-by-a-nun thriller, Paco Plaza’s “Veronica.”

That 2017 film, set in 1991, was about a spectral “Hermana Muerte” (“Sister Death”) who pursued the title character after a seance. The new film tells us what a nun who came to teach at Veronica’s school went through after the Spanish Civil War, and what she finds out happened at a convent school during that cataclysm.

“Sister Death” is a mash-up of horror tropes trotted out in many other films — a triggering solar ecclipse, scary nuns, an over-matched noviciate, symbolic game of “hangman” and a child tormented by “the girl,” with the student’s hair as a singular source of vulnerability.

As a stand-alone film, it’s moody and spooky, if a bit hard to follow. It’s ambitious in the way it wades into the Civil War and its violence, and clumsy in its attempts to tie itself into “Veronica.”

But those recycled tropes have a little less sting than they might. The frights are too often of the “It was only a nightmare” variety.

An extraordinary event near the end of the Civil War turns a little girl in a remote mountain village into a “miracle child,” one with visions of the Virgin Mary. Ten years later (1949ish), the child is the 20ish Sister Narcissa (Aria Bedmar), a novice clothed in white ready to teach the students at a convent school with a troubled past.

The girls boarded there labor in the convent’s laundry, a Catholic scandal in some countries, and are easily rattled by the callous Sister Julia (Maru Valdivielso), a martinet singularly unimpressed by Narcissa’s “Miracle Girl” past.

But Mother Superior (Luisa Merelas) is a fan. So Narcissa has a job and her work cut out for her, winning over and teaching her students in the face of strange, supernatural goings-on and a climate of fear that the girls develop over “The Girl,” an apparition they’ve heard of and start seeing for themselves.

Little Rosa (Sara Roch) becomes the spectre’s target.

Sister Narcissa starts to piece together a dark secret the place is keeping, one about a long dead Sister Socorro, and how that might (supernaturally) “explain” what’s happening.

Spanish TV actress Bedmar does a decent job of suggesting realistic human reactions to experiencing the extraordinary. It’s a more nuanced performance than is common in horror, partly explained by Sister Narcissa’s past. As a child, she was exposed to “miracles.” So the supernatural threat here is terrifying, but taken at face value.

The effects are modest and get the job done — characters “floating” on a dolly into a shot, a simple novice’s veil and habit that attack the young nun wearing them.

But it’s all too familiar to be very frightening in the wake of so many “Scary Nun” stories. And the Spanish Civil War flashbacks, which Narcissa “experiences” in dreams or hallucinations, are both graphic and murky in who caused what and why that created a Monster Nun Ghost seeking vengeance.

Connecting all of it to “Veronica” seems more cute than necessary or useful.

Rating: TV-MA, bloody violence, sexual assault, suicide

Cast: Aria Bedmar, Maru Valdivielso, Luisa Merelas, Sara Roch,
Chelo Vivares and Sandra Escacena.

Credits: Directed by Paco Plaza, scripted by Jorge Guerricaechevarría and Paco Plaza. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:31