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| THE PRIESTS , 2025 |
When The Priests (2015) arrived on the Korean film scene, it felt like a spiritual aftershock — not because it reinvented the exorcism genre, but because it recontextualized it. With its grim Catholic overtones and haunting psychological textures, Jang Jae-hyun’s directorial debut dragged the battle between heaven and hell into the Korean cultural psyche, stripping away the neon stylings of shamanic horror for candlelit crucifixes and Vatican rites. A decade later, The Priests 2: Dark Nuns (2025), directed by Hyeok-jae Kwon, doesn't merely continue this story — it upends it. Where the first film exposed the rot inside religious institutions through the eyes of broken men, the sequel reframes the battlefield through the eyes of women, crafting a deeply feminist reckoning with the structures that contain both good and evil.
At its core, The Priests is a story of masculine desperation — a pair of spiritual misfits trying to hold back hell with incense and holy water. Kim Yun-seok’s Father Kim is the perfect emblem of institutional collapse: once respected, now disgraced, he is half prophet, half pariah. Gang Don-won’s seminarian Choi, meanwhile, embodies spiritual imposter syndrome, a man drafted not by calling but by the vacancy left by more willing souls.
The film unfolds slowly, with the first act bogged down in Church red tape and theological mutterings. Yet beneath this bureaucratic malaise is something sharper: a profound unease with how faith is managed, policed, and weaponized. In a particularly damning twist, Father Kim is accused of molestation — not because of evidence, but because that’s easier for the Church to believe than the presence of a demon. Evil, in this world, is always second to scandal.
But once the exorcism begins, The Priests reveals its true purpose. This is no Hollywood possession spectacle; it is a meticulous descent into spiritual chaos. The imagery becomes feverish: shadows stretch like claws, candles flicker like dying breath, and a possessed girl writhes in an agony that feels biblical. Go Nak-seon’s cinematography and Yang Jin-mo’s editing create a nightmarish rhythm, one that mirrors the frantic prayers of its protagonists. Here, finally, is the monster — not just the demon, but the institutional fear of truth, the dread of spiritual vulnerability, and the exhaustion of faith itself.
Yet even in its most visceral moments, The Priests remains fundamentally about men. Men saving women. Men confronting evil. Men collapsing under the weight of belief. The girl at the center of the exorcism is never given voice or agency — she is a battleground, not a character. And perhaps that’s why Dark Nuns feels like a necessary heresy.
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| THE PRIESTS 2 : DARK NUNS , 2025 |
Dark Nuns does not pick up the story so much as it burns the first film’s blueprint and starts over. Where The Priests treats women as vessels for demonic horror, Dark Nuns allows them to claim the altar. Sister Giulia, played with bristling defiance by Hye-kyo Song, is not a priest — she isn’t even sanctioned — and yet she is the most powerful exorcist on screen in either film. Her chain-smoking irreverence and rage-tinted intuition mark her as a radical force in a tradition that has always kept women at the margins.
The film’s central exorcism is of a young man, Hee-Joon, but as with the first film, the body is secondary to the battle. The real fight is ideological, between Giulia and the condescending Father Paolo (Jin-wook Lee), who masks his timidity in scientific jargon. Between them stands Sister Michaela (Yeo-been Jeon), a doctor-nun torn between allegiances, who slowly awakens to the radical potential of female solidarity.
Here, exorcism becomes something more than ritual. It becomes resistance.
Kwon’s direction is colder than Jang’s — less visceral, more cerebral. The horror does not erupt in vomit or screams, but in eerie stillness, in demon’s-eye shots gliding across rooftops like ghosts inside systems. These formal choices refuse to deliver conventional scares, and that’s the point. Dark Nuns is not concerned with whether demons exist; it is concerned with where they hide — in the language of men, in the exclusions of theology, in the cowardice of sterile reason.
The film’s most compelling conceit — that “dark nuns” are women conceived during demonic possession — imbues the story with a potent mythos. These are not pseudo-mystics or supernatural freaks; they are women born into liminality, trapped between worlds, bearing both stigma and power. Had they been men, they would be ordained. As women, they are anomalies — feared, needed, and ultimately uncontainable.
Together, The Priests and Dark Nuns tell a story not of two films, but of a cultural evolution. The first is about the fall of institutional faith — its hypocrisies, blind spots, and fragile masculinities. The second is about what rises in its place — a fractured but fierce spirituality led by women who no longer ask for permission to wield it.
These films mirror each other in structure but diverge in intent. The Priests builds toward spectacle, seeking catharsis through ritual. Dark Nuns avoids catharsis altogether. It lets its ending fester, unresolved. Its heroines do not “win.” They simply refuse to lose, refuse to be subsumed by the definitions men have written for them.
And it’s this refusal that makes Dark Nuns more than a sequel. It is a confrontation — with genre, with theology, with the viewer. It asks us to reconsider what horror means when the demons are not always monstrous and the heroes do not always look like priests.
In a film landscape still dominated by male saviors and female victims, the two Priests films offer an unsettling and vital counter-narrative. They chart a movement — from patriarchal collapse to feminist defiance, from exorcism as dogma to exorcism as metaphor. They haunt not because they scare, but because they suggest that faith, like horror, is only as powerful as who controls the story.
And now, at last, the women are writing their own chapters — not with rosaries, but with fire.
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