What actually happens
A convent that needed a few more nuns
In Romania in 1952, an unseen force attacks two nuns at the Saint Cartha monastery. The surviving nun, Sister Victoria, runs from a demon that looks like a nun and hangs herself rather than let it use her body. A villager who delivers the nuns' supplies, known as Frenchie, finds her body. The Vatican sends Father Burke and Sister Irene, who is still a novice, to find out what happened. They meet Frenchie, go to the abbey, look at Victoria's body and take a key from it. The Abbess tells them the nuns keep silence at night, so they have to wait until the next day. As Frenchie leaves, a demon in the form of Victoria's corpse attacks him. Later that night, hallucinations of a boy Burke once failed to save lure him toward the graveyard, and the demon buries him alive. This is the scene to brace for, and it comes early. Burke is pulled out by Irene and survives.
Reading this instead of watching it is the correct decision. Scaredy Cat makes that decision automatic, for free.
The abbey used to be a castle with a hole in it
Burke and Irene return the next day, but the abbey is cloistered, so only Irene is allowed in. She meets the other nuns, who tell her they pray in shifts around the clock to keep the entity away. She also learns the building's history. It was a castle in the Dark Ages, owned by the Duke of St. Carta, an occult enthusiast who brought the demon in by way of a rift under the building. Christian knights killed him, sealed the rift with a vial of the Blood of Christ and took the castle back to contain the evil. Bombing in World War II reopened the rift. A book Burke took after being buried alive identifies the demon as Valak, and he works out that the Abbess has been dead the whole time.
Nobody Irene has been talking to is real
Valak attacks Irene, and she prays alongside the nuns to hold it off. When she finds Burke and Frenchie again, she learns that none of the nuns she has been talking to were real, and that she has been praying by herself the whole time. Sister Victoria was the last nun left in the abbey. She had killed herself to keep Valak from possessing her. That leaves Irene, Burke and Frenchie, and they settle on one plan.
The tunnel with the flooded room
This is the final scene, near the end. The trio decide the way to stop Valak is to close the rift with the Blood of Christ, as the knights once did, and they use Victoria's key to get the vial from the reliquary. Irene asks Burke to make her a professed nun, and he does. In the tunnel, Valak possesses Irene. Frenchie smears the blood on her face, which drives the demon out, but Valak then holds her under water in a flooded chamber. Irene had kept some of the blood in her mouth, and what she does with it ends the fight.
The ending, explained
Irene spits the blood she kept in her mouth into Valak's face, which banishes it and seals the rift. Frenchie revives Irene and tells her his real name is Maurice. Neither of them knows that Valak possessed Maurice earlier, during the attack. Twenty years later, Carolyn Perron attends a university seminar in Wakefield, Massachusetts, where Ed and Lorraine Warren play footage of their attempt to exorcise an older Maurice. He grabs Lorraine and shows her a vision of Ed dying, which sets off the Warrens' investigation of the Perron farmhouse.
The post-credits ruling
There is no post-credits scene. You can leave when the credits start.
✓ Spoiled safelyDog status: none. There is no dog in this one.
Questions people ask at 1am
Is The Nun scary?
The Nun is a 5 out of 10 with low dread. It has a lot of jump scares and a creepy abbey, but little gore, and most of the fear is over when the credits roll.
How does The Nun end?
Irene banishes the demon Valak by spitting the Blood of Christ into its face, and the rift is sealed. Frenchie survives, but Valak possessed him earlier, which leads to the Warrens' investigation twenty years later.
Does the dog die in The Nun?
There is no dog in The Nun, so no dog dies. No other animal dies either.
Is there a post-credits scene in The Nun?
No. The Nun has no post-credits scene, so you can leave when the credits start.
Who is Valak in The Nun?
Valak is the demon that appears as a nun. The Duke of St. Carta summoned it through a rift in the abbey's catacombs centuries ago, and World War II bombing reopened the rift.
