La Monja (also known as The Nun), is a 2005 Spanish horror film directed by Luis De La Madrid.
Plot
Years ago, a cruel, insane and merciless nun turned a boarding school into a living hell for her students. By punishment and pain, she wanted to banish all sin. The name of this nun was Ursula. After finding out one of the girls on the boarding school was pregnant, she tried to kill the unborn child- only to be drowned by the pregnant girl and her friends. Her body is dumped in a lake.
Eighteen years after that, the lake in which the girls threw Ursula's dead body in, was emptied and Ursula's spirit was set free. And it wanted revenge. All of Ursula's students were named after a saint, and Ursula's spirit killed the (now) ladies the same way their namesakes were murdered.
The girl who caused all of it- the unborn child, Eve- goes to the boarding school, after her mother (the pregnant girl Ursula wanted to 'cleanse') is murdered, to find out what is going on. There, she met the other two survivors, and together with some of Eve's friends they defend themselves from Ursula's spirit whilst desperately trying to figure out how to banish the nun once and for all.
In the Movie, one of the girls named Mary is discovered to have been impregnated by an important Official at the school after having had an affair with him in her young teenage years. The girl had bought a Pregnancy test. Just as she discovered that she was indeed pregnant, the malicious Nun Sister Ursula walks in on her in the bathroom to see what she is doing and discovers her secret.
Disgusted, the Nun tries to force an Abortion on the girl with a bathroom appliance. But her friends, having snuck out earlier that same night to have a Night-time snack the girls hear Mary screaming in Pain as the Nun brutalises her. They attack the Nun and force her to release Mary, causing her to bump her head then fall into a bath tub filled with water. But that doesn't kill her, she opens her eyes moments later scaring the others girls which prompts them to hold the Nun down and drown her.
The girls leave Sister Ursula in a pond blessed by priests as Holy Water. They swear an Oath of secrecy, and the Spanish Authorities of Barcelona simply put the Sister down as missing.
Eighteen years later, the pond is drained. The vengeful soul of the nun is thus freed from her watery prison, and leaves to wreak havok on the lives and deaths of the girls who were her mortal downfall.
The first act of the ghostly Ursula is the incineration, not seen on screen, of Johanna in London. Then Mary herself is attacked by the evil spirit in her own home. Eve, the main character of this film, arrives home to see an apparition slitting her mother's throat before leaving through a window. After reporting this to the police and being disbelieved - her mother's death being recorded as suicide - Eve joins with an old friend of her mother's to create her own investigation.
After Joanna's death in London Christy, along with all the other girls involved in the Ursula incident, had suspected that it was not an accident and that it somehow had something to do with the Murder they had committed years earlier. Christy plans to tell Eve everything she knows, but before they are able to meet for the discussion, Christy is killed in an elevator, her hands horribly severed.
Eve returns Home that Night and finds an old Love letter addressed to her mother, by someone named Miguel. But other than that she finds nothing that could point her to the answers she needs. So Eve takes it upon herself to see the other members of her mother's circle of friends and warn them before it is too late. She goes to a Special Theological Institute where she can find the Archives of the Old Boarding school which had been shut down after the Nun's Disappearance. The woman told her she was going to meet with her Mother the next day and all of the other Classmates in Barcelona, Spain. Eve decides to go to Barcelona and warn them and try and find out what had actually happened.
Later on she meets and falls in love with a young Spanish man whom is studying to be a Priest and employs him to translate all of the Archival Documents for her. He returns later that Night with the information she seeks including the Address of one of the Survivors, a Woman named Eulalia who is Native to Barcelona. But she arrives too late as Eulalia is Murdered by the Nun by being Crucified in her own bathroom. She and the others arrived on the scene to see Eulalia dead but also hear a message left on the answering machine by the last two survivors of the group asking her to meet with them on the old boarding school. She and her friends go there to warn them. She explains that Eulalia and Christy are both dead. And that she has seen the killer and knows her to be the nun Ursula. The women explain to her this is impossible because they had taken her life years before.
Eve asks them where Ursula's old room is, and once there she and the young priest find a Bible dedicated to Ursula by a priest named Father Miguel.Eve remembers the name Miguel and tries to understand what was is familiar about it. In a romantic moment she and the young priest kiss - only for Eve to stop it as she does not want to do anything in the room where the creature that had killed her mother once lived.
The Priest receives a moment of clarity and asks her to remain there while he goes to check something. Once alone, the spirit of the dead nun in the form of water appears under the covers of her old bed and passes right though Eve. Eve receives a vision of her mother in the past, speaking on the phone to a man named Miguel. Once the Priest returns he finds her in a state of shock and comforts her then shows her what he has discovered. As everyone gathers in a hallway, he explains that each of the girls, the women who are nonw dying, share their names with Catholic saints. As these saints died, so are the women dying. A sick re-enactment of the Martyrdom.
At this point, one of the two remaining women starts to vocally blame Eve for the trouble they are all in, as she is "the sin" that Sister Ursula was trying to purge in the first place. She locks herself up in a room, where she is then killed by the Nun by decapitation. The last survivor tells Eve that her father was a catholic priest, Father Miguel, and that was why the other survivor blamed her for the whole situation. The young priest supposes that the Nun could only die in the water and that she can only be killed as her own namesake Saint, St. Ursula had died : By an arrow through the heart. They make a makeshift arrow and place it in a gun to fire it into the Nun's heart and kill her. once and for all. They do not manage to lay Ursula to rest in time to save the last survivor, who is burned to death in an oven. Unfortunately the young Priest is also killed, as he is hurled into a wall by a bursting water main, due to a plan to flood a room so that Eve could vanquish the spirit of Ursula.
Eve enters the room, takes breaths and waits underwater with the gun in hand to face her opponent. She is told by Joel that his theory is that he believes that Eve must have always been mentally deranged, and knew all along that she had been fathered by a Priest. He supposes that her mother and mother's friends had murdered the nun. So she somehow developed a split personality taking on the role of the nun and thus carried out these murders in her name.
Plot Holes
Joel's theory doesn't explain the death of Johnanna, who is killed in London, even thou Eve is in New York City. Also, Eve
Cast
- Eve - Anita Briem
- Julia - Belén Blanco
- Joel - Alistair Freeland
- Gabriel - Manu Fullola
- Zoe - Paulina Gálvez
- Susy - Natalia Dicenta
- Eulalia - Oriana Bonet
- Christy - Teté Delgado
- Mary - Lola Marceli
- Ursula - Cristina Piaget
- Joana - Montse Pla
- Bibí - Alessandra Streignard
- Botones - Ludovic Tattevin
See also
External links
