A Catholic’s Review of ‘Warrior Nun’

Warrior Nun, one of Netflix’s most recent comics-based installments, is about a girl named Ava who, after growing up a quadriplegic as a result of a tragic car accident which killed her parents when she was young, dies (for reasons revealed later on in the show). Despite this, however, she is brought back to life when a nun from the fictional Order of the Cruciform Sword implants an angel’s halo into the back of her corpse. The show follows Ava as she discovers the mission that is thrust upon her by the OCS—a religious order that forms women into half-nuns, half-ninjas—to do away with demons that haunt the world.

As a Catholic, it’s difficult to avoid watching this show without noticing its obvious references to the Church and her inner workings, as well as to Catholicism in general. Thus, I will be writing my review from two distinct perspectives: a storytelling perspective and a Catholic perspective. The former will critique the show solely as cinema, whereas the latter will reflect upon the claims it makes—both implicit and explicit—about the Church herself and perhaps even about religion in general.

**Spoilers ahead!

The Storytelling

There are a few aspects of Warrior Nun’s storytelling that bothered me. One is that it seemed to rely a bit too much on dialogue. As I was watching, there were many times that I found myself thinking that something the characters were talking about could have been revealed to the audience without any talking at all, which would have improved the show’s quality. As they say, the general rule of thumb for filmmakers is “show, don’t tell.” This is exacerbated by the fact that some of the show (an inconsistent amount of it, I might add) includes a voiceover by Ava in which the audience hears what is going on in her head during certain events. Much of the things Ava says in these voiceovers, however, could have been left unsaid and the plot would have progressed equally as far, or her character would have developed just as much. This seemed to hamper the pacing, especially in the beginning, which at times felt a bit slow. This is not to say that the writing was necessarily terrible. At its worst, some lines seemed forced; at its best, they were clever and funny. This of course was influenced a lot by the acting, which was on the whole good.

Another major aspect of the show I would critique has to do with the characters, both their motivations and their development. Concerning the latter, there are quite a few characters that seemed underdeveloped. The most obvious example of this is the group of squatters Ava meets in the beginning of the show soon after she is resurrected by the power of the halo. Upon meeting them, the audience is given no reason to care about them, and they soon become very forgettable. Even their bandleader and Ava’s love interest, JC, is relatively insignificant to the plot, and besides a very brief conversation he has with Ava in which he reveals some things about his past, we learn nearly nothing about him and as a result have equally little reason to want him to do well. JC and the rest of the crew even disappear halfway through the season, and frankly, I did not miss them.

Ava herself too suffered from a lack of character development. This is especially a shame because I found her to be generally unlikable as a character: she has a tendency to be rude, insolent, and sometimes a bit stuck up—and she pretty much stays that way throughout the whole show. In general, most of the characters go through little to no change throughout the show’s course of events, which I found to be somewhat disappointing.

The other problem relating to the characters, however, was their motivations. There were many times when I was a bit confused about what the characters wanted, making their actions less intelligible. The main example of this I have in mind is when Ava is first introduced to the Order of the Cruciform Sword. Ava had no reason to believe or go along with anything she was told or shown by the Order: the sisters had sedated her, captured her, and brought her back to the Order’s base of operations, all against her will. But immediately after she wakes and begins walking around the area with Father Vincent, listening to him try to convince her to stay, she gives no indication that she is at all wary of any of the people or goings-on around her; rather, she seems weirdly okay with everything happening around her—nuns sparring with each other in ninja outfits, stories about an angel’s halo being implanted into women’s backs. Her immediate reaction isn’t one of surprise or astonishment, which is what I would have expected. Sometimes she even seems excited. She only decides to escape at the very end of the episode after much inner conflict, conflict which seemed unwarranted.

The exception to these problems is Sister Beatrice. Although she does not change much throughout the show, she does not need to. As a calm voice of reason, she is the foil to the other characters’ strongheaded personalities. Her motivation is always clear and remains the same: to serve God, the Church, and her order—all beautifully noble things. This is a welcome change from many of the other characters, almost all of whom are generally self-serving. Towards the end of the show, when Beatrice tells of her past to Ava, I felt sympathy for her.

Considering all these things, Warrior Nun—understood solely as cinema—was okay. Many of the action scenes were fun to watch, and the cinematography was quite good (though I’m not an expert in the field, so take that judgment with a grain of salt). However, I found the second half of the show more enjoyable than the first: it begins with pacing problems and confusing motivations, but those tend to get cleared up a bit in the second half. If you’re looking for a Netflix show that is taken from comics and has Catholic themes, I would highly recommend Daredevil over Warrior Nun, but the latter is still certainly watchable. Nevertheless, as a Catholic, there are other important things about Warrior Nun you should keep in mind.

The Catholic Stuff

Because the plot of Warrior Nun takes place within the Catholic Church, one can expect the show to say many things about it. Surprisingly, the show does not flat-out disparage and reject the Church and her teachings, as one may come to expect with pretty much anything that comes out of Hollywood nowadays. Its attitude toward the Catholic Church—and perhaps toward religion in general—was rather one of aloof fascination. It’s clear that the show’s intended audience is not devout Catholics, but instead the secular popular culture; yet it does not shy away from the statements it must make, given its plot: for example, the characters admit that God, angels, and demons are real. (One strange exception to this is Ava, who continues to seek a scientific explanation to the supernatural realm even after seeing a demon with her own eyes.) But the show always remains aloof to these realities—to the makers of the show, it seems, God, angels, and demons are as real as hobbits. The show admits of their reality only insofar as it is set in a “sub-created” (to use Tolkien’s term) fantasy world in which those realities exist. It is no wonder that the show itself is currently considered within the genre of sci-fi and fantasy, for it seems to assume that such realities are nothing more than that: fantasy. Warrior Nun may consider them “cool” or “interesting,” but not because it takes them to be true. Rather, the underlying assumption is that the invisible realities aren’t true, but it would be sort of “cool” if they were, and maybe how they are presented in the show is what it would look like.

The reason I think the show makes this assumption is because it takes quite a few liberties with respect to the Church’s teachings. For example, although it considers angels and demons to be “real,” it takes them to be physical things with material bodies (which is to be expected, since in the modern secular mind, the only real things are physical, material things) who are simply from another dimension which can be accessed (eventually, anyway) through scientific instruments. It even takes a halo to be a physical part of an angel which can apparently be removed and shoved into a human’s back to give him or her superpowers or bring the dead back to life. The show also considers demonic possession to happen against the will of the one possessed. On the contrary, the Church teaches that one cannot become demonically possessed unless one willfully invites the demon to do so. Then, of course, the obvious example is the supposition that there is within the Church a religious order of nuns who train in martial arts to fight demons. These are just a few of the countless liberties the show takes with regard to Catholic teachings—evidence that it does not take the Church’s teachings on such matters seriously.

It was no surprise to me, then, that the plot centered around the idea that those in the upper levels of the Church’s hierarchy are corrupt and serve the forces of evil, directly contrary to what the Church is supposed to stand for. To be clear, I am not saying that such a thing could never happen in the Church—indeed, it has in the past. But it is unclear at best what the show is trying to say about the Church now by having its characters, who are Church prelates, be corrupt. It might be too strong to say that the writers think those currently in the Church’s upper ranks are as corrupt and evil as the characters in those positions in the show. But it’s also hard for me to believe that the members of the intended audience—those who are part of the secular, modern culture—would hold a healthy suspension of belief about such a claim. I suspect that many of them would not be surprised if they were told that such corruption does in fact exist in the Church. For the secular, modern culture already holds not only the Catholic Church, but religion and all its institutions, in contempt.

Overall, before watching this show, I was expecting Warrior Nun to be a cinematic version of the toppling of Catholic statues. It was not that. But it did not exactly praise the Catholic Church or give the most flattering impression of it either. I cannot say I would exactly recommend this show to Catholics.