Nuns! Has there ever been a career so over-represented in cinema? Why is that? Is it because that black-and-white costume is such an easy shorthand for good morals and immaculate, untouchable femininity that they erase the need for a lot of time-consuming character backstory? All you have to establish very quickly is if you're presenting "Nice Nun" (skips around mountains, sings, loves children, may clap) or "Nasty Nun" (skips niceties, shouts, hits children, may have the clap), and your scene is so easily set.
This week's nun is Meryl Streep, which presents a nagging possibility that this may, at some point, lead to upbeat songs - but within the first 10 seconds we see her looking stern, slapping a child around the back of the head, and sternly disapproving of something or other. So we can be quite assured that she is the latter kind of nun. The bad kind. We will keep believing that until she sings.
Around 15 seconds in, Philip Seymour Hoffman arrives, dressed as a priest and walking that familiar PSH line between "teddy bear" and "creepy". Sometimes you just want to pick him up and cuddle him till his face turns blue, sometimes you get the feeling that he would give you the heebie-jeebies reading Mr Men books out loud. This is the latter kind of Philip Seymour Hoffman, the slightly skin-crawling one.
THERE IS NO EVIDENCE
33 seconds in and the camera's doing something annoying and wonky. Nothing in the trailer so far has suggested fancy-schmancy camera work - everything else has been a straight-as-a-die fixed shot - but all of a sudden we're looking at some kind of tense confrontation in a darkened office, made strange and different and new by the fact that the director of photography seems to have been on the piss over lunch and left his wooden leg in a dive bar somewhere near the set. Desperate to carry on regardless in the hope that no one will notice, he's just decided to film the scene resting on the stump where the bottom half of his calf once resided. Standing alone in a sea of straight-up camerawork, it's bloody annoying, though. Bad sign. Bad sign.
THERE ARE NO WITNESSES
Something may or may not have happened but we're not entirely sure what. But seeing as it involves a priest and a school filled with attractive young children, we can probably make an educated guess.
"You haven't the slightest proof of anything!" shouts Father Philip Seymour Hoffman. Never, I must say, the kind of thing one should say to actively erase all suspicion in one's activities.
"I have my certainty!" screams Sister Streep in response - another argument that wouldn't hold up in court.
BUT FOR ONE
And I think we can be sure that the one in question is Meryl, as she's done nothing but wander around looking suspicious and disapproving for the whole of the 1min 30sec so far. And she's not sung one upbeat song yet, which I think we can all agree is very disappointing.
THERE IS NO DOUBT
There is no Abba, more like. At 1min 55sec, there is thunder and lightning, though: wind blowing out the net curtains in a room, and other portents of bad. This is, from the look of it, a complex story of accusations, suspicion, bad weather, wonky cameras, and one nun's fear of losing the old order of things in the face of modern young priests with fancy liberal values. From the look of this trailer, Meryl's got used to one way of doing things, and doesn't take kindly to new ideas. Insert your own joke about bad habits here, please.
So what have we learned? From the first glimpse of that severe costume, you knew this harked back to that long line of nun-centric cinema. But there are no nuns here on any kind of run. No nuns who secretly turn out to be criminals in drag, though some in the trailer could pass for that. No choirs of nuns or nuns on bicycles, sexy nuns or fallen nuns. Nope, just the grumpy kind. Those hoping for a fun-packed, rollercoaster of a nun-movie will be disappointed as the trailer draws to an end.
However, those whose mission in life is to see every film about nuns ever made - the good, the bad and the played-by-Streep - congratulations! You've been Nunned!
