'The Conjuring: Last Rites' Review: Horror Finale Fails to Scare in Sendoff
James Wan completely and permanently altered the horror movie landscape when he delivered The Conjuring in the early 2010’s. That movie, and its eventual sequel, did so well because of Wan’s ability to refine them to a painstaking extent; narratively, they’re suffocatingly simple at times, existing and impacting only by the merit of the scary set pieces that drive them.
The director’s use of camera movement, prolonged takes, muted colors and ever-relatable themes of familial bonding set his heavy-hitting duo of movies apart in a way that had audiences clamoring for more, hence the franchise that was thus spawned as a result. The first two Conjuring efforts are so patient and wonderfully tactile, with multiple scares from each standing out as some of the best the genre has seen in the modern day.
Even after Wan’s exit from the director’s chair, it seemed as if these mainline movies had a standard of quality that had to be met. Even if it wasn’t quite as sharp as the first two, Michael Chaves’ The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It felt like a light version of its predecessors that, at the very least, understood why audiences liked them so much. That film also found success in the mundane, expanding Ed and Lorraine Warren’s (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) backstory in order to bolster the impact of a narrative that was built around them.
That movie is arguably the most underrated in the franchise, and left a lot of promise for Chaves’ eventual work within the franchise as it continued to grow. Even his Nun sequel delivered ample spooks and vast improvements over the first film in that spinoff series. So, naturally, when he was attached to Last Rites, it seemed to most like a safe bet, if nothing else.
And yet now, looking back on the whole thing, it’s shocking that this film in the state it was released made it off the cutting room floor. The Conjuring: Last Rites is an overlong, inconceivably dull, tonally confused finale that does little more than tighten the strings already tied up by the movie before it. How did we get here?
Almost everything that works here can be credited to an origin prior to this movie. Wilson and Farmiga are, as always, brilliant and moving. Their earnest performances carry most of the film’s dramatic weight, even when the screenplay is woefully more worried about their now-adult daughter’s fledgling relationship with her boyfriend, who is a new, and rather pointless, addition.
Admittedly, Chaves does manage to pull off a few impactful scares when he slows things down and focuses on the haunting itself, just as he did in his previous mainline entry. The lights get low, the music screeches, and the director allows his environments to crumble around characters. Even if the centered Smurl family isn’t quite as developed as previous franchise victims, Last Rites does enough in the first two acts to spur enough good will from the audience for their being put in peril to work. That is, until the movie basically abandons them in the finale.
This movie’s final act is the greatest deviance from the franchise’s go-to formula that any of these movies have seen yet, and every aspect of it is for the worse. Gone are the scriptural declarations and longstanding spiritual outlines, now replaced by corny depictions of “inner demons” and nursery rhymes with inexplicable physical power. It’s stuff you expect from a one-off, mid-budget studio horror movie; not from the final entry in one of the most successful horror series to ever exist.
Then again, it seems to be working, as Last Rites scored the biggest global opening weekend for a horror movie in history, racking up a staggering $194M against a budget of just $55M. As the movies get worse, they make more money — it’s for this exact reason that one of the most creatively freeing genres in the medium constantly finds itself stuck in the mud.
The Conjuring: Last Rites is the proverbial mud hole. On multiple occasions, it trades a tight “show don’t tell” philosophy for breathy exposition and tireless over-explaining. The last thing your final movie should have to do is introduce a bevy of new concepts and characters, actively taking away from the existing ones that made the movies what they are in the first place. It almost feels like the writers thought this was too easy, and wanted to give audiences more than they were asking for in the form of this big, all-encompassing sendoff.
But what you end up with is a movie that feels like three movies with an identity broken and scattered between the unfitting pieces. The film, to that point, runs for a hefty 135 minutes, and it spends the majority of it dwelling on those aforementioned new additions and last-second changes. Last Rites is playing catch up for absolutely no reason whatsoever. This was a layup, folks, but the ball didn’t so much as grace the rim.
If anything else positive can be said about the film, it is in the aesthetic achieved by the production. Chaves and his crew shot the brakes off of this thing, credit where credit is due. Even the bad stuff at least looks good, save for the random, insistent uses of bad computer-generated effects on occasion. The occasional prosthetic work rules, the 80’s setting is sharply adapted, and the general “vibe",” if you will, is certainly there.
It just doesn't come together in concept or on the page, and Last Rites falls well short as a result. If you’re a fan of this franchise, it may be worth checking out to see the Warrens slow dance into the sunset. Otherwise, this is a wash of an experience at the cinemas. Not scary enough to be a horror movie, nor investing enough to be a drama, The Conjuring: Last Rites is a massive sigh in cinematic form.