Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Warrior Nun’ On Netflix, Where A Dead Girl Is Given New Life By An Angelic Artifact And Joins A Team Of Fighting Nuns

Warrior Nun is based on a manga-style character created by Ben Dunn. There were a series of comics based on the character and the nuns that help her battle demons, and the comics based on the character are so steeped in Catholic lore that they’ve run afoul of critics on both sides of the religious fence. But will the Netflix series based on those comics skip the religious falderol? Read on for more…

WARRIOR NUN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Shots of an ornate cross and statues of Jesus and various saints. Then the ornate ceiling of a church. “Andalusa, Spain – Present Day.” We pan down to see the body of a young girl.

The Gist: We hear the girl, 19-year-old Ava Silva (Alba Baptista), say in voice over that she always dreamed of being dead just so she can see her own body, just being normal. Ava lived and died in a Catholic orphanage in Andalusa, brought there after a car accident left her mother dead and Ava a quadriplegic. “I stare at her perfect normality until I wake up and realize I’ve still been the freak I’ve been my whole life. What I’ve learned since then is life has a fucked up way of making her dreams come true.” The nun who ran the orphanage felt she should be in hell; though her life on earth was already hellish.

Elsewhere, a group of nuns in battle gear take their injured commander, Sister Shannon (Melina Matthews) into a church to tend to her wounds. But she’s mortally wounded, and she insists that the halo artifact in her back be taken out, even though that will assuredly kill her. Shotgun Mary (Toya Turner), her closest confidant in the warrior nun troupe, doesn’t want to let her go, but others, including Sister Lilith (Lorena Andrea) and Sister Beatrice (Kristina Tonteri-Young) know what needs to be done. The demons that ambushed them are coming for them, and the halo needs to be protected. A nun takes the halo just as the church explodes, and ends up putting it in the back of Ava’s corpse.

Ava wakes up from being dead, and realizes that she is not only alive, but can walk for the first time in 12 years. She escapes the chaos at the church and walks through the town. When she’s hit on by some sleazy guys, she pukes on them, then gets hit by a truck, which launches her through the wall of a store. She somehow not only survives, but the massive injuries to her legs heal quickly. She realizes that she’s not only alive and can walk, but has “super powers.” After she goes back to the orphanage and visits her roommate, she then just tries to experience as much as possible, including dancing in a club and drinking booze. She also realizes she can push a bouncer and knock him cold. She sees a red, misty being floating around the city and is compelled to follow it.

She then finds a pool behind a ritzy villa, realizes mid-jump that she can’t swim, and has to be saved by a handsome guy named JC (Emilio Sakraya). He and his friends, Chanel (May Simón Lifschitz), Randall (Dimitri Abold) and Zori (Charlotte Vega) are squatting at the villa; they consider themselves “opportunists”, taking things in a way that don’t harm others.

In the meantime, Father Vincent (Tristán Ulloa) arrives from the Vatican to direct the warrior nuns as to what they need to do next, as well as figure out where the halo is. When he learns more about Ava, he starts to wonder if her possession of the halo, which the demons can’t detect as well once it’s under her skin, wasn’t completely coincidental.

Our Take: Warrior Nun is based on Ben Dunn’s manga-style comics character Warrior Nun Areala; the character was adapted into this show by Simon Barry. There’s a lot to like about it, from Baptista’s performance as the bewildered but fascinated Ava to the very idea that there are warrior nuns who battle very real and violent demons in this world. The first episode, though, has a number of issues that muddle the message a bit.

First of all, there’s Ava’s voice over, which starts like any voice over from any teen drama, with Ava being self-loathing about her situation. But then, it transforms into a running inner monologue that is at times funny but most of the time very distracting. We’re not sure if the monologue was always supposed to be there, or was edited in later. But devices like hearing Ava moon over JC, for instance, instead of listening to him talk felt like it belonged in another show, not one about a religious demon hunter who is about to be recruited as a warrior nun.

That’s the other part that’s confounding. How many episodes will we go through until Father Vincent tracks Ava down, recruits her into the battling sisterhood, and she starts to get a handle on the powers the halo has given her? We get that in the streaming world that writers can tell their stories at a slower pace. But man, we so wanted Ava to at least meet with Vincent or start working with his most trusted soldier, Shotgun Mary, by the end of the episode. Instead, we see Ava go to a club with the young grifters she’s befriended, take some Molly, and follow the red mist yet again.

That slow pace leads to a disjointed story that we know is going somewhere, but it forces us to decide whether we want to take the ride with it. We’re not sure we care all that much about the young grifters, though we know Ava is going to fall for JC pretty hard. We just want to see Ava and the nuns battle. And it feels like the show will get there… eventually. But how much other stuff is the viewer going to need to put up with before that happens?

Sex and Skin: None, at least in the first episode.

Parting Shot: As Father Vincent describes to a bartender how demons are hiding in plain sight in our world, we see the local priest who was tending to Ava after she died get killed in bloody fashion by a claw-footed demon. Then we see Ava walking out of the club with JC, the halo that’s under her skin glowing red.

Sleeper Star: Toya Turner’s few first-episode scenes as Shotgun Mary really got us interested in her character. She not only had a relationship with Sister Shannon, but Vincent trusts her implicitly. She also seems to be the most aggressive of the pretty-aggressive band of warrior nuns.

Most Pilot-y Line: “Just keep talking, pretty boy,” we hear Eva’s inner monologue say while JC talked. “I don’t care what you’re talking about, I just see lips I want to kiss.” Like we said before, we didn’t need that; the look on Ava’s face told us enough about how attracted to JC she was.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Warrior Nun has more than enough appealing factors to keep us watching, especially a lead performance by Baptista that shows us that Ava will be a bit of a Buffy-esque warrior. But at this point we’re not sure if the show wants to be about fighting demons or about young adult friskiness, and it doesn’t look like its two sides are going to mesh together very well.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company.com, RollingStone.com, Billboard and elsewhere.

Stream Warrior Nun On Netflix