Review: THE CONJURING: LAST RITES

 by Rob DiCristino

The last one until the next one.

Buckle your Holy Shit Belts, everyone, because I’m about to hit you with some numbers: Across eight theatrical releases in twelve years, the Conjuring franchise has grossed more than $2.1 billion at the box office on a combined budget — a combined budget! — of just over $200 million. That’s an Infinity War-sized return for an Incredible Hulk-sized investment! That’s two Moanas for the price of an Argylle! That’s almost two Top Gun: Mavericks for less than a Tomorrow War! In short, that’s what those polo-shirt-wearing guys who make fun of the way I hit golf balls call “a very sound return on investment”! It should come as no surprise, then, that horror’s most lucrative IP would see another entry this year: The Conjuring: Last Rites. Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga return as real-life liars paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, with Mia Tomlinson joining in as their daughter, Judy. Billed as the grand series finale, Last Rites pits the Warrens against a new haunted house, the demons of their past, and — scariest of all — Judy’s new fiancé.

We begin in the mid-1960s, when a young Ed and Lorraine (mercifully played by Orion Smith and Madison Lawlor instead of de-aged mannequins of Wilson and Farmiga) encounter a mirror-haunting entity so powerful that it shocks Lorraine into early labor. Little Judy manages to recover from stillbirth, fortunately, and the Warrens try to put that unsolved case in their rear-view mirror. But since we live in a cold, unforgiving universe, that mirror guy returns twenty years later to haunt Pittstown, Pennsylvania’s Smerl family (Elliot Cowan, Rebecca Calder, and others). Unwilling to risk Ed’s health by coming out of retirement — and preoccupied with Judy’s sudden engagement to Tony (Ben Hardy), a former police officer with a mysterious past — the Warrens ignore desperate pleas for help from Father Gordon (Steve Coulter) until their daughter forces their hand. Whatever haunts the Smerls is calling to Judy, and it’ll take every shameless lie weapon in the Warrens’ arsenal to clear one last skeleton from their closet and free them to live out their golden years in peace.

Written out like that, The Conjuring: Last Rites actually sounds pretty coherent. There’s the palpable tension between two very different families, with Judy — the obvious choice for protagonist — acting as the connective thematic tissue between them. Her parents always shielded her from the snake oil they were selling remarkable things they were doing, so finally getting to free a family from demonic infestation could silence the visions that have haunted her and open up a whole new world of discovery. But once she goes down that road, is there any turning back? That’s the clean conflict right in front of us: Tony wants to get married. The demon wants revenge. Will she take up the family business, or will she and Tony dismiss all this nonsense and find a quiet tract of suburbia where their kids can have a playroom instead of a museum of haunted artifacts, like she did? We know the answer, of course, which means Last Rites has a clear opportunity to close Ed and Lorraine Warren’s story on a graceful note while keeping the Conjuring train on rails for another generation.

But since you’re a discerning reader who knows better than to believe anything dumped into theaters at the end of the summer is worth watching, it won’t shock you to learn that Last Rites does none of that! Instead, Conjuring universe veteran Michael Chaves solders together a pair of dry, bloated, completely disconnected stories and hopes we’re too overwhelmed by our unyielding devotion to The Warren Saga to notice how fucking boring they are. A “shocking” prologue gives way to an hour of domestic hijinks — in fairness, Hardy has a chemistry with Wilson that a better movie would have embraced — interspersed with stories from Pennsylvania’s House of Random Jump Scares. The Smerls are eight strong with zero to do, and early conflicts between sisters (Kila Lord Cassidy and Beau Gadsdon) amount to nothing of consequence by the end. Nor do Judy’s visions. Or Ed’s heart condition. The families forge no connections. The Warrens learn nothing. Change nothing. It’s all a meaningless hunk of nothing. They don’t even let Patrick Wilson play guitar this time.

Regardless, The Conjuring is too powerful a force for Last Rites not to slide into the domestic top ten by the end of the year, which will keep the coals warm for whatever amount of time is considered appropriate before a reboot is greenlit. It couldn’t matter less that the film is an uninspired piece of shit, which, at this point, says far more about the questionable taste of mass audiences than it does about the questionable integrity of its masterminds. It’s no secret that horror fans love being catered to — Last Rites ends with an Avengers-style coda that will be absolutely perplexing to anyone without encyclopedic knowledge of the franchise’s every nook and cranny — but if we’re going to survive the onslaught of AI slop that is already infiltrating genre cinema like, well, like poltergeists in Conjuring movies, we’re going to need to hold these films to a higher standard. I don’t like the Conjuring movies; I’ll admit it. But if you’ve read this far, it’s likely that you do, and you deserve far better than Last Rites. Frankly, I’m Weapons or Bust at this point, and you should be, too.

The Conjuring: Last Rites hits U.S. theaters on Friday, September 5th.