Sister Irene Conjuring: Who She Is and Who Plays Her

Sister Irene is the novice nun at the center of The Nun (2018), directed by Corin Hardy, and its sequel The Nun II (2023), directed by Michael Chaves. Taissa Farmiga plays her and is billed first in both films.

We first meet her in 1952, when she is a young novice who has not yet taken her vows. The Vatican sends her with Father Burke (Demián Bichir), a priest who investigates troubling miracles, to the remote abbey of St. Carta in Romania, after a nun there takes her own life.

The two Nun films are spin-offs rather than main saga entries, but they carry real weight in the franchise. In chronological order, The Nun (2018) comes first of all the films, and The Nun II sits third, set four years later. Irene leads both, with Jonas Bloquet (as Maurice Theriault) and Bonnie Aarons (as Valak) returning alongside her. If you are working out where she fits, the Conjuring movies in order guide lays out both sequences.

Irene's arc runs from a novice who has not yet taken her vows in The Nun (2018) to a nun who drives Valak out by The Nun II.

In the first film, a French Canadian local called Frenchie guides Irene and Father Burke to the abbey. Irene starts having disturbing visions, and the resident nuns say they keep up constant prayer to hold something back. She learns that Valak, a demon that takes the form of a nun, is loose in the building. Its power comes through a gateway in the catacombs, left open by a duke's occult rituals long ago. Many of the nuns she has been speaking with turn out not to be real, and the Abbess has been dead the whole time. Burke and Irene find a vial holding the blood of Christ, the one thing that can stop the demon. Valak possesses Irene for a time, and Frenchie frees her by exposing her to the blood. Irene finally defeats Valak by spitting the sacred blood into its face, and the gateway closes.

The Nun II (2023) picks up in 1956. After a priest is killed, Irene is told that similar deaths are happening across Europe and that Valak is probably behind them. She travels to Tarascon with Sister Debra (Storm Reid), a nun unsure of her own faith, and finds that the demon is hunting descendants of St. Lucy so that it can claim her relic, hidden at a boarding school built in a former monastery. Irene uses the red glowing eyes of a stained glass goat to find the relic. When Valak attacks her, it cannot burn her, because she is a descendant of St. Lucy herself. Irene and Debra drive the demon out by reciting the Words of Institution as the wine turns into the blood of Christ.

Sister Irene and Lorraine Warren are two different characters: Irene is played by Taissa Farmiga and Lorraine by Vera Farmiga, and the films never present them as one person. The two stories are linked by the way The Nun (2018) closes.

That ending cuts to about twenty years later and shows Ed and Lorraine Warren's lecture footage from The Conjuring (2013). Ed names the possessed man in that footage as Maurice, which is Frenchie's real name, so the abbey events tie straight into the Warrens' first encounter with Valak. The Nun II closes with another link, a post credit scene of Ed and Lorraine (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) using archive footage from The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It. For Lorraine herself, see Lorraine Warren in The Conjuring, and for her husband, Ed Warren in The Conjuring.

Irene's other key relationships are Father Burke, her guide in the first film, and Frenchie (Jonas Bloquet), who turns out to have been secretly possessed. In the sequel Sister Debra becomes her partner. Her main enemy is Valak, played by Bonnie Aarons, who also plays the Demon Nun in The Conjuring 2. See Valak, the Nun for the demon's profile.

Sister Irene is alive at the end of both Nun films, and no later film shows her death.

In The Nun (2018) she survives her possession and seals the catacomb gateway, leaving the abbey alongside Burke and Frenchie. In The Nun II (2023) she and Debra banish Valak at the school in Tarascon, and the threat to the school ends. The film shows that she is a descendant of Saint Lucy, and that this bloodline protects her from the demon's fire. Valak hunts Saint Lucy's descendants to claim her relic, so Irene's ancestry is the reason the demon cannot burn her. Nothing in the later main films, such as The Conjuring: Last Rites, says what became of her afterward, so her story is left open.

Did Valak possess her? Yes, for a time in the first film, and Frenchie broke the hold by exposing her to the blood of Christ. Is her story real? The main films are based on cases claimed by Ed and Lorraine Warren, and those remain claims rather than proven events. The abbey story in The Nun (2018) is a spin-off set in 1952, years before the Warren cases shown in the main films.

In my opinion, Irene's best moments are the ones where the film lets her be afraid and keeps going anyway.

The strongest is the discovery in the first film that she has been praying alone, with nuns who were never there. It is a clean piece of creature design logic, because Valak does not need to chase her when it can simply rearrange who she thinks she is talking to. The Abbess being dead the whole time makes every earlier scene play differently on a rewatch. Second, I would pick the finish, when she spits the sacred blood into Valak's face. It is a crude, almost physical act in a film otherwise built on atmosphere, and it works because the rules have been set up so plainly: the blood is the one thing that stops the demon.

The Nun II is a more even film, and perhaps its best Irene scene is the quieter one, where the stained glass goat's red eyes show her where the relic is hidden. It is a puzzle moment rather than a jump scare. That being said, the finale, with the wine turning into the blood of Christ while she and Debra recite the Words of Institution, gives her the clearest payoff of the series. For her place among the other films, see our Conjuring movies ranked page.