Review: The Conjuring: Last Rites

Director:  Michael Chaves

Stars:  Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Mia Tomlinson

Stay with me a moment here, but I’ve been thinking a bit about the mid ’70s and punk rock, emerging in several cities but most famously in London and New York. Jarring, obnoxious, short bursts of energy in rebellion against the state. In rebellion against the generations. And in rebellion of a stagnant industry in which the glowering monoliths of prog-rock were calcifying guitar music. Watching The Conjuring: Last Rites I wondered – with some excitement I might add – what might be the new punk rock for horror movies. Because we’ve got to have something invigorating if this is the status quo.

In what promises (promises, promises…) to be the last film in a series of 10 interconnected instalments, we once again foreground saintly conservative paranormal investigators Ed (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine Warren (Vera Farmiga). It’s now 1986 and they have ostensibly retired due to Ed’s declining health (the problems with his ticker established in 2021’s The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It are resurrected here for another half-hearted stab at some mortal stakes). But wouldn’t you know it, there’s one last case too shocking, too awful for them to resist.

Well. Actually. Not that hard for them to resist, as they only intersect with it in the last third of this interminable 136 minute hell ride.

In the CG soup of a Pennsylvanian industrial town, the eight-strong Smurl family are being harassed by all manner of evil entities emanating from an accursed full-length dress mirror. Before you can say “Oculus” people are being lured into dark cupboards, being levitated at bedtime or getting tricked into games of peekaboo with yet another generic horror hag. It’s an absolute shit-show. But it’s far removed from the Warrens… or so they think. The movie’s 1964 cold open tips the audience to the contrary, teeing up a connection that the film will then take a full hour and forty minutes to vocalise. By which point the reaction is less “Oh, wow!” and more “Yes, and…?”.

The Conjuring: Last Rites is the fourth entry since 2019 to be helmed by Michael Chaves, who’s come to feel like the janitor intrusted with the keys now that all the staff have long exited the building. He’s shown himself dependable enough to let the clock run down, and so it goes here with an effort that never once presses to remix the series’ tired old formulas. Unless you count over an hour of trivial domestic melodramas at the Warren home a significant overhaul of this property.

If it is, it’s fairly unwelcome. It doesn’t help that these antics foreground Mia Tomlinson as their paranormally-sensitive daughter Judy. Tomlinson teeters between the energies of Bryce Dallas Howard and Zooey Deschanel but without the screen presence of either. Ben Hardy as her beau Tony doesn’t fare much better, earnestly perpetuating this universe’s legacy of Incredibly Bland White Guys Who Stand There.

The long, long, long opening two acts are of course pocked with little boos, but ingenuity isn’t a part of the equation. It helps little that the parameters of the spectral menaces are left wholly open, meaning they can do what they like when they like so long as it suits the scene. The range is wildly inconsistent. And with so much borrowed or echoed from other movies, the creepiest element of the movie – by far – is the notion that someone in 1986 would hang a John Wayne poster in their basement. 

With such a sluggish build-up, the third act acceleration is welcome but chaotic. Motivations and mechanics go out the window with so much flying glass, leaving a cod final confrontation about facing your fears that does nothing to resolve a number of unanswered questions. Chaves shows some boldness in the staging compared to his prior pictures, but it’s an editorial mess that crashes with whiplash-inducing speed into the movie’s sappy on-screen text coda.

Unsurprisingly the Warrens come out of all this unscathed; their Hollywood versions are easy to love because they’re so broadly romanticised, and because Patrick Wilson remains such a sturdily likeable everyman. And maybe it was just too late in the day to start investigating some of the less wholesome accusations that lay at their door. But the hagiography is taken too far this time. A borderline offensive scene at the movie’s beginning openly suggests that Ed and Lorraine were in some way holier and more deserving of happiness than others. If their screen story has an obvious ‘jump the shark’ moment, this is it, and there’s two whole hours to go.

So… positives. Eli Born is the movie’s real MVP. His cinematography is perhaps the most handsome in this franchise’s history. The film stock has an earthen quality that tallies with the movie’s settings, giving Last Rites the feel of a possession movie of old. A classical touch. But, sigh, even this produces problems whenever a digitally-bolstered nasty comes pelting toward the camera. The differing sensibilities clash, making Chaves’ ghoulish entities seem more artificial than ever. This creates a real conundrum. Somehow Last Rites is at its best when it’s at its most ‘boring’, when it’s not dragging out the ghost train scares. 

Near the movie’s beginning we see the Warrens lecturing to a near-empty hall, where they’re mocked by students who relate their endeavours to the movie Ghostbusters. The Conjuring universe would have us believe that their work was loftier than that, but with so many screen adventures under their belts, the evidence isn’t conclusive. This seems like their last go-round, and it feels like a belated, exhausted retirement. But with the movie tipped to bring in the box office, I’m sure something similar will take its place to capitalise.

So I’m moved to ask again, what new blood can re-energise the mainstream in reaction to these tired, overlong and antiquated jump-scare vehicles? Now, more than ever, we need the new punk.