The allegedly final Conjuring film is a limp conclusion to a weak franchise.
The real life Ed and Lorraine Warren were awful people, but the films very loosely based on their lives are pretty successful, both financially and as an act of reputational rehabilitation. Creatively? That’s another story. There’s not much to differentiate between the Conjuring flicks and any dozen low budget, allegedly “true” ghost stories that cram themselves into the back blocks of Prime Video and Tubi apart from brand name recognition.
Last Rites is purportedly the last one, but takes time to plant the seeds for both sequels and prequels. When it’s not doing that, we get an ‘80s-set supernatural adventure that sees Ed and Lorraine (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga, both too good for this) tackle a haunting in Pennsylvania, where the Smurl family are being targeted by some manner of supernatural entity or other – probably a demon, right? It’s always a demon.
There’s also a possible connection between the whatever-it-is (screenwriters Ian Goldberg,Richard Naing, and David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick fumble an attempt at cleverness here) and the Warrens’ now-grown daughter, Judy (Mia Tomlinson, taking over from McKenna Grace in Annabelle Comes Home). She’s a psychic, just like her mother, and is head over heels in love with Ben Hardy’s ex-cop, Tony Sperra. Luckily for her, good guy Tony takes all the occult nonsense he’s been plunged into with remarkable grace. So, we get an odd combination of haunted house chiller and gentle family comedy, as the Warrens battle the forces of darkness, while poor Tony tries to impress his future father-in-law at the family cook out.
Which could be fun – Poltergeist springs immediately to mind as only one of dozens of films that have milked the contrast of the mundane and the supernatural for frightening effect. Heck, Stephen King’s mastery of that contrast is why he’s Stephen King. But Last Rites relies on the same jump scares, the same murky mysticism, and the same Polaroid-flash ‘70s aesthetic of the previous films, albeit leavened with a splash of ‘80s fluoro here and there. There’s nothing much new here.
In fact, there’s been nothing new for a while. The Conjuring films have always struggled with understanding what exactly they’re about. Once you get over the breathless “based on a true story” marketing patter, there’s not much to the franchise. It fails as a work of biography because, let’s face it, 90% of this shit never happened – it makes Bohemian Rhapsody look like a Ken Burns documentary. Its lightly sketched “Catholicism For Dummies” mythology does not reward close study. And in refusing to to depict the Warrens in anything but the most flattering light, it fails to show us anything interesting at all.
The Conjuring: Last Rites is in cinemas now.
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