‘The Conjuring: Last Rites’ Review

With ‘The Conjuring: Last Rites’, the Conjuring Cinematic Universe has come to an end, taking all of the nuns, creepy dolls, and haunted working class families with it. This conclusion runs long, spending too much time paying tribute to the franchise’s history and examining family drama within the Warren clan, but there are enough scares to keep the film entertaining enough despite its many flaws.

Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga are back as Ed and Lorraine Warren, paranormal investigators who take on supernatural cases the church is too slow to respond to. The film opens in flashback, looking at a young Ed and Lorraine during their first encounter with a demon, one possessing a creepy mirror in an antique store. Lorraine approaches the mirror while pregnant, but upon touching the mirror she senses danger – for her, and the baby. For whatever reason, the demon wants her baby and will follow Lorraine forever to get her.

In the present day of 1986, Ed and Lorraine are semi-retired from casework as Ed recovers from a heart attack. But a family in Pennsylvania starts encountering unexplainable supernatural phenomena shortly after the confirmation of one of the daughters, during which she is gifted the same creepy mirror the Warrens encountered so many years ago. The demon is back, and has not forgotten Ed and Lorraine’s now-grown daughter, thus forcing the Warrens out of their retirement in order to take on the evil that has haunted them since the beginning.

The narrative momentum is lacking throughout, as despite the viewer knowing this haunted mirror intertwines the fates of the Warrens and the Smurl family, these dual plot threads aren’t joined together until about ninety minutes into the movie. Much of the film is disjointed, with the Warrens plot largely devoid of scares, focusing instead on the domestic drama of Ed’s health and the daughter Judy’s budding romance with former cop Tony (Mia Tomlinson and Ben Hardy respectively).

Thus most of the scares are limited to the Smurl family, though there are plenty of attempts at scares, ranging from the cheap but effective, to the outright silly. The demons throughout the film are often just callbacks to characters introduced throughout the broader Conjuring universe, as the film ponderously plays up the knowledge that this will be the final Conjuring film. There are monsters, iconography, and even characters from the previous Conjuring films, all operating as a knowing wink at the audience, encouraging them to remember the good times.

When new demons are introduced, they evoke less fear than laughter. Annabelle worked once because it is a creepy looking doll, but there are only so many times you can go back to the creepy-doll-behaving-unnaturally well before the scares are trite and predictable. It works even less when the new demon designs seem lazy and childish.

For a film that is slow and ponderous for about 80% of its runtime, the climax is rushed, filled with noise and CGI, as if the filmmakers want to hurry through it so the viewer can’t spend much time reflecting on just how lame the climactic battle truly is.

Michael Chaves’s direction very much follows the stylebook James Wan established with the first ‘The Conjuring’ film in 2013 – traditional, formal framing, slow zooms and precise sound design. The effect is a form of nostalgia bait, recalling the aesthetic of 1970s haunted house classics such as ‘The Amityville Horror’ without bringing anything new to the horror genre. The style is so polished that none of the horror has any lasting impact, further undermined by Chaves’s deficiency in building the memorable, slow burn scares that James Wan is so adept at. There are demons aplenty, and yet the stakes never seem very real.

Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga bring gravitas to Ed and Lorraine Warren, elevating the film even in its silliest moments. While some of the scares are effective, ‘The Conjuring: Last Rites’ would almost certainly have been a better film if there was less effort put into reflecting on the franchise at large, and more put into telling a simple, contained story of a haunting and the innocent people whose lives will never be the same.

The Conjuring: Last Rites
Rated R for bloody/violent content and terror.
Running Time: 2 hours and 15 minutes

Director Michael Chaves
Writers Ian Goldberg, Richard Naing, David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick
Stars Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Mia Tomlinson, Ben Hardy
Rating R
Running Time 135 Minutes
Genres Horror, Mystery, Thriller