The Conjuring: Last Rites

In The Conjuring: Last Rites, set in 1986, Ed and Lorraine Warren tackle their final case, investigating the Smurl family’s haunted Pennsylvania home. A cursed antique mirror, tied to a disturbing encounter from the Warrens’ past, unleashes demonic forces, including an axe-wielding spirit, tormenting the Smurls with visions, physical attacks, and supernatural chaos. As the Warrens, joined by their psychically gifted daughter Judy and her fiancé Tony, confront the malevolent entities, they fight to save the family and protect their own legacy.

The Conjuring: Last Rites Review

CONTEXT: I put the first The Conjuring on in the background while writing this, and even though I’m generally not a fan of horror films, it’s pretty darn good. It avoids splatter horror’s gratuitous excesses and leans heavily into creepiness and the mystery behind the film’s haunting. Totally Worth it.

                   

Perhaps, if you’ve watched the rest of The Conjuring series, the Last Rites familiarity and call backs will evoke something in you; however, if you’re like me, and hadn’t seen any of them before this one, you’ll be counting the seconds until it’s over. Unfortunately, there are a lot of seconds.

Solid production value and talented performers can’t save a production riddled with stock horror elements and pacing reduced to a crawl by narrative speed deserts. Until its final moments, The Conjuring: Last Rites struggles to find its rhythm, spending almost no time with the family in peril. Instead, interrupting any hints of momentum with overlong and uninteresting scenes seemingly meant to firmly establish Judy (the daughter of the main characters) and her boyfriend/future husband as franchise replacements for the retiring leads.

The real problem is that this shift in focus not only breaks the tempo but also dulls the emotional connection between the audience and the family being traumatized. It results in a film that must then rely solely on jump scares and Dutch angles to move the audience. However, unless you’re the 20-something girl who was sitting next to me at the theater and who must not have ever seen a horror film before, Last Rites scares offer absolutely nothing new or innovative, and without a sufficient bond between victims and audience, how scary can some shaking luggage or flickering lights be?

The leads, Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga, are as dependable in their roles now as they were over a decade ago when they first inhabited the Warrens. So too, the rest of the cast does a fine job. No, the quality of the performances isn’t at issue. That the characters are written so blandly, on the other hand, is.

If you’ve never seen any of the films in The Conjuring series, I wouldn’t recommend starting with Last Rites… or finishing with it, for that matter. Do check out the one that started it all.

WOKE REPORT

The Power of Self Compels You

• The Christian faith (specifically Catholicism) plays a major role in the lives of most of the characters, if not necessarily the story. Both the Warrens and the family being haunted are deeply religious, and the Word of God is shown to hurt ghosts and demons alike. However,
  Spoiler

  in the climax’s last minutes, the exorcist rites slow but ultimately do not stop the spiritual attacker(s). Instead, both female leads must learn to tap into their own inner awesomeness and channel that strength to defeat the evil. Yes, their personal power is more potent than that of the Creator of all things.
  • There are few things more woke than this particular brand of arrogance.

Ghosts Don’t Kill People. People Kill People

• The line “…like getting guns off the street” is said by Patrick Wilson’s Ed Warren as an analogy for why he and his wife collect possessed items rather than destroying them. However, I’m not entirely convinced that this is a woke line.
  • First, it’s actually a callback to the first movie in which he tells a reporter the same exact thing.
  • Second, when I was a child in the 80s (the setting of the film), getting guns “off the street” meant getting illegal guns out of the hands of violent gang members. It had nothing to do with restricting anyone’s Second Amendment rights.