There have been a few winners over the years. The Annabelle movies, tracing the history of the evil doll currently caged in the Warren's basement, were about, you know, an evil doll: automatic win there. And The Nun movies, about an evil nun who... possessed a painting? They were often surprisingly full throttle when it came to just throwing scary stuff at the screen.
But it always came back to Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga), renowned paranormal investigators - well, renowned unless you actually looked up anything at all about their real life activities, in which case yikes. Pretty much the only way to enjoy these movies is to pretend they're about fictional characters investigating fictional cases, an approach the movies themselves are more than happy to encourage.
Supposedly this film is about their final case; the opening makes it very clear they were well on their way out even before people started spewing up broken glass and hanging themselves in a church. It's 1986 - though it often looks a decade or more before that: one of this film's secret strengths is the way it realises that for most people the world is always at least a few years out of date - and the Warrens are giving poorly attended lectures to disinterested teens shouting out lines from Ghostbusters, which is a much better movie than this one.
The birth of their first and only child Judy (Mia Tomlinson, taking over from Sterling Jerins) was messed up by an evil mirror inherited by a young woman who literally vanishes from the story (when asked about her later, Ed says "we don't know what happened to her"); 22 years later, the mirror turns up in Pittsburgh as a confirmation gift for the Smurl family's teen daughter. It's creepy, she hates it, she and her sister throw it out but uh oh, that only makes things worse. Who you gonna call?
Ed's heart attack (as seen in The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It) and Lorraine's worries that she's passed on her psychic gift to Judy mean they waffle about for ages before deciding to help the Smurls, providing plenty of time to explore the relationship between Judy and besotted beau Tony (Ben Hardy). Will they become the next generation of spectre-seekers, battling grunge ghosts in the early 90s? Guess that all depends on the box office.
None of this makes all that much sense but there's a decent atmosphere around the hellish Pittsburgh house (this was filmed in the UK) and the jump scare stuff is mostly effective. It's a long slow build up to an "all hell breaks loose" exorcism ending - evil grannies, an axe wielding farmer, and a holy book that bursts into flames all make an appearence - and while none of it is all that memorable, it's a decent enough amusement park ride through the usual spooky cliches.
The good news for regular church-goers is that this is about as overtly religious as a mainstream US film (currently) gets. The bad news is that all your faith is pretty much useless when a demonic force gets you in its sights. Just ask the spectacularly useless priest in this; looks like we're going to need a bigger crucifix.
- Anthony Morris
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