There might not be a more reprehensible movie franchise today than The Conjuring universe. Some of the movies have been watchable, most notably the first two in the main Conjuring series. But overall, the films, while varying in quality, have done unforgivable things, from taking the Satanic Panic and other hoaxes at face value to making honorable heroes out of two people, Ed and Lorraine Warren, who in real life were almost certainly grifting frauds.
There can be a situation where a popular movie presents itself as history, but almost nothing that happens is true; the best example is Oliver Stone’s JFK. But JFK is great movie. The Conjuring series, especially its last two entries, has been marked by convoluted plotting and almost shockingly incompetent filmmaking.
The Conjuring: Last Rites is the fourth film in the main Conjuring series, with the first two films directed by the talented James Wan. However, there have also been several spinoffs, including three involving the evil doll Annabelle and two more involving “The Nun.” Another film, 2019’s The Curse of La Llorona, is related but has been dropped from the official Conjuring canon.
The films practically canonize the Warrens, who spent several decades insinuating themselves into alleged ghost-haunting cases and made themselves famous as nationally-renowned ghost experts. Like many horror movies, the Conjuring films are happy to leech off Catholic theology and iconography, and I maintain the only good movie about exorcisms remains the original The Exorcist.
Both Warrens were still alive when these movies started, but have since died, so the films have succeeded at giving them a completely false legacy. The new film, insultingly, adds an end-of-film title that informs us that the Warrens spent their careers fighting the “scientific establishment.”
The latest film, which follows 2021’s terrible The Devil Made Me Do It and brings back director Michael Chaves, focuses on the “Smurl haunting,” in which a large family in a small town in Northeast Pennsylvania claimed their house was haunted for many years by an evil spirit. Like most of the subjects of these movies, the story’s been adapted before, in a 1991 TV movie called The Haunted.
By the point of the narrative, which is in the 1980s, the Warrens (played as always by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) are in semi-retirement from active casework, thanks to Ed’s heart problems. They’ve taken to giving lectures to mostly empty college lecture halls where the students only want to make Ghostbusters jokes. Also, they have a daughter named Judy, who’s got some clairvoyance as well.
The daughter’s played by English actress Mia Tomlinson, who looks as if the filmmakers cloned Zooey Deschanel, bangs and all. She’s also got a boyfriend (Ben Hardy, who played Roger Taylor in the Bohemian Rhapsody movie), and God help anyone who might marry into this family.
The haunted house case draws them to Pennsylvania for a third-act showdown that’s incoherent. I realize this franchise is largely about scary demons jumping out of the shadows, but Last Rites does a horrible job of making sense of the action. It also doesn’t help that the plot is needlessly complex.
The film can’t get Pennsylvania right, either. Shot in the U.K., the film is more coded to Western Pennsylvania than Northeastern. It also sticks something resembling the Bethlehem Steelstacks about a block away from the haunted house in West Pittston, which in reality is more than 80 miles away.
There’s some occasional inspired material, such as a scene where Judy seemingly gets trapped by a series of mirrors while in a bridal shop (the main villain, it turns out, is an evil mirror). And there’s one scene where Wilson plays ping pong, which will ring a bell for fans of HBO’s Girls (though this time, Lena Dunham isn’t there, and no one is naked).
The series featured skeptic antagonists in the second film and then got that out of its system, but it might’ve been more interesting if the daughter, or maybe the daughter’s boyfriend, had been a skeptic.