Warrior Nun review: Netflix series is just about eccentric enough to work
There’s a time and a place for subtlety in television, and it is not a comic-book adaptation called Warrior Nun.
Netflix’s latest play for the kids-but-actually-all-of-us Stranger Things demographic is a kind of updated Buffy the Vampire Slayer set in contemporary Spain, complete with spooky crypts, angels, hell monsters, avuncular priests and even a swarthy hunk called “JC” (Emilio Sakraya), not to mention the warrior nuns of the title, that’s just about eccentric enough to work.
At the outset, a platoon of young women in black ninja outfits is fighting a losing battle against a force of mysterious goons. The sisters, among them Sister Lilith (Lorena Andrea) and Sister Beatrice (Kristina Tonteri-Young) have retreated to a morgue-crypt with a dying comrade with a glowing metal halo in her back. Think of Iron Man, with the nonsensical tech-bro exposition replaced by nonsensical religious exposition.
In a last-ditch attempt to stop this artefact falling into enemy hands, a nurse plunges it into the back of another corpse, Ava (Alba Baptista), a 19-year-old orphan who recently died in unexplained circumstances. With the golden ring lodged between her shoulder blades, Ava comes roaring back to life. In case the viewer was confused about what to expect, a Billie Eilish tune plays as Ava starts to work out what’s happened.
She adjusts quickly to her new superhuman strength and regenerative abilities. “The Catholics are a little twitchy about who gets to be resurrected,” she says, agreeing with an old friend in the orphanage about the need for secrecy. “Unless they get to control the narrative.”
Ava does what any self-healing young person would do and sets out in search of a good time. She runs down the beach, dances alone in a bar and jumps into a stranger’s pool, forgetting she can’t swim. Luckily, she is rescued by the aforementioned JC, who introduces Ava to his friends, a band of beautiful Euro-misfits who style themselves as rebels against bankers, oligarchs and other faces of The Man. Sadly, even in modern Spain you can’t go around with a magical halo in your back for long before you draw unwelcome attention. Who is this young woman, and why was she dead in that mysterious crypt in the first place? Soon it will be time for her to join the ninjas and fulfil her destiny.
Like Buffy, Warrior Nun does not wear its parallels lightly: the demons of young adulthood versus literal demons, the solace of like-minded souls, the power of institutions to protect and oppress. A lot hangs on Baptista, who must find enough naivety that we can believe in her transition to warrior hero, but not so much that we can’t believe in her as a hedonistic 19-year old keen to do pills and get laid. On the evidence of the first episode, she strikes a reasonable balance, and despite some flat dialogue and a predictable plot there is an agreeable energy to Warrior Nun. The Catholic material lends even its silliest sequences a certain gravitas, which paradoxically frees the programme from having to take itself too seriously. Nuns on the run have always known how to party.
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