Neither particularly scary nor notably original, The Conjuring franchise and its spin-offs have raked in a goosebump-inducing $2.3 billion at the global box office. Cool?
Maybe it is the fact that the real-life couple who inspired the series were allegedly not-so-awesome (to put it mildly). Maybe it is the fact that every monster that appears is either explicitly silly looking (Annabelle) or resembles Marilyn Manson cosplay (The Nun). Maybe it is the shockingly poor pacing, the unclear motives of every supernatural baddie, the frequently dodgy acting, or the odd and unearned air of seeming pretentiousness. But if this is the end of The Conjuring, which it almost certainly isn’t (because money), then…you know…cool?
The fourth main installment is dubbed Last Rites. That kind of uninspired wordplay defines the generic blah that has floated like gossamer ectoplasm over all of these movies. This one is about a possessed mirror. That’s really what it is about, honest. And it takes well over two hours to tell the story of said mirror, which builds to perhaps the most unintentionally hilarious climax in ages.
Before the evil mirror finds itself in literal physical fight, Last Rites starts with the Warrens’ first case, during which a demon lays claim to their unborn baby. Decades later, that baby is all grown up and fixin’ to get hitched. Judy (Mia Tomlinson) brings her boyfriend Tony (Ben Hary) to spend time with her mom, Lorraine (Vera Farmiga), and dad, Ed (Patrick Wilson). Tony is nervous. He wants to ask permission to marry Judy but has to wait until after Ed finishes giving a tour of his basement, which is filled with demonically possessed artifacts. Those items are safer there, Ed says, without providing so much as the tiniest morsel of actual reasoning as to why.
Meanwhile, the demon mirror starts tormenting the Smurl family in Pennsylvania. It does all that classic bad mirror stuff. You know, things like making baby dolls levitate and causing a teenaged girl to barf bloody shards of glass. The Warrens are unable to help because they are retired due to Ed’s heart condition. But Judy, who is also sensitive to the bogeyman’s wavelength like her mom, pulls her parents in to help. Then they fight the mirror. Physically. They physically fight a mirror.
There’s one good scene in the movie, in which a priest meets his untimely end in a waiting room. The rest is boring when it is not silly and vice versa. It has cameos from all of the series’ classic foes. “Hey, there’s The Nun from The Nun 2,” you will think. “Look, it’s Annabelle from Annabelle 2,” you will notice.
And then it ends with an audaciously self-important closing text, which literally says that the Warrens were brave to stand up to science. To be clear, The Conjuring movies have no bigger point or message. They are thematically null. They are spiritually and moralistically bankrupt, even if their pockets are lined. But it is insane to explicitly call out science like it is the bad guy right now. Science is the good guy. Being smart is good. Being educated is good. Science good, anti-science bad. Who knows what the Warrens saw or believed they saw? But even in this goofy, cash-grabbing fictionalized bit of nonsense, let’s not frame these folks as truth-telling heroes who stood up to “the man.”
The only reason this doesn’t get an F is because Farmiga and Wilson are still putting in real effort and are impossibly likeable. Otherwise, it would be irresistible to root for The Nun from The Nun 2 or Annabelle from Annabelle 2 or, you know, the mirror.
Grade = D
Other Critical Voices to Consider
Nicolas Delgadillo at Knotfest says “It’s not a great movie, but there’s a sincerity to the way it bids farewell to Ed and Lorraine that makes it more satisfying than anything in The Devil Made Me Do It. For fans who have stuck with these characters for over a decade, that may be enough.”
Rain Jokinen at Mulling Movies says “I get that the vast majority of horror movies are going to be based in fantasy. I don’t demand realism in all of my horror. But it just feels like The Conjuring movies are trying to have it both ways, touting the true event inspirations, and then showing us things that would never, ever, in a million years, actually happen.” Note: Jokinen’s review is excellent and fully articulates what I didn’t realize I was feeling about the series’ big issues.
Joshua Mbonu at In Session Film says “So while it has some heart and the two great lead performances that have always been at its center, The Conjuring: Last Rites is an underwhelming capper to the franchise that suffers from an overlong runtime and scares that pale in comparison to the franchise’s best. Even if the film is nowhere near one of the worst films of the year, this finale only cemented the Conjuring franchise as the horror slop that it was once the antidote for.”
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