Wilson and Farmiga are as good as they have ever been, and the first hour has two frights worth the ticket. Then the Smurls are left to their ghost while the Warrens attend to their feelings, and 136 minutes is a long time to say goodbye.
Michael Chaves directs the latest film about Ed and Lorraine Warren and, the tagline promises, the last. It is the Eighties. Ed (Patrick Wilson) is greyer and slower to the door, Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) has not stopped seeing things, and their daughter Judy (Mia Tomlinson) is grown, with Tony Spera (Ben Hardy) at her side. Elsewhere the Smurls, Jack (Elliot Cowan), Janet (Rebecca Calder) and four daughters, have something in the house that does not want them there. For an hour this is a decent, old-fashioned chiller. Then it becomes a film about the Warrens’ feelings, and it runs to 136 minutes.
The scares, when they come, are well made. Eli Born shoots the Smurl house in brown and amber and holds the frame wide, so that you spend the scene watching the far doorway rather than the actor, which is where a haunted-house film does its work. Elliot Greenberg and Gregory Plotkin cut two set pieces we would put against anything in the earlier films: a doll that crawls, slowly and at floor level, while the camera declines to look away, and a home video in which a figure appears for a single frame and is gone before the eye has agreed it was there. We jumped at the second one, and we were pleased to have been got, because it was earned by patience rather than volume.
Wilson and Farmiga have played this couple for twelve years and it shows in the right way. Wilson gives Ed a stiff back and a man’s irritation at being told to sit down; Farmiga plays Lorraine as someone who has seen the worst and is tired rather than frightened. When the film puts the two of them in a kitchen and lets them talk, it is warmer than the genre usually allows, and we did not begrudge it. The trouble is how often it does this while the Smurls are screaming in another room.
John Frankish’s production design does the decade without winking: wood panelling, patterned carpet, a television the size of a sideboard. Graham Churchyard dresses the Smurl girls in knitwear and pleated skirts that make them look like a school photograph, which is the right kind of ordinary for a family about to be terrorised. Benjamin Wallfisch’s score works in low strings and long silences and is mostly good about not telling us when to flinch.
The script is where it goes wrong. Ian B. Goldberg, Richard Naing and David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick, working from a story by Johnson-McGoldrick and James Wan, have decided that the real subject is the Warren family, and so the Smurls, who have the house and the ghost, become a case file the film keeps putting down. Cowan and Calder are given fear and little else. The girls (Kíla Lord Cassidy, Beau Gadsdon, Tilly Walker, Molly Cartwright) are a set of reactions rather than people. Whatever is in the house is never much more than a shape and a noise, and a horror film with no villain to speak of has to work hard everywhere else.
The second half takes a turn we will not describe, except to say that it moves the weight from the Smurls to Judy, and that Tomlinson does what she can with a part written mostly in tears. The last forty minutes go soft in a way we found hard to forgive. We were bored, in a horror film, with the lights off and every intention of being scared, and then we were irritated that a series which once knew exactly how long to hold a shot had forgotten. The ending is sentimental, and sentiment is not what anyone bought a ticket for.
James Wan’s original, The Conjuring from 2013, was a small, patient film about a house, and this is a large, hurried one about a marriage. Chaves’s own previous entry, The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It in 2021, was worse than this, and the best scenes here are better than anything in that. The critics are split roughly down the middle and so, in honesty, are we: a good first hour, two frights worth keeping, and a farewell that outstays itself.
See it if you have followed the Warrens this far and want to see them off; Wilson and Farmiga make that worth doing. If you are coming fresh, start with the 2013 film. And if you watch this at home, the 15 certificate is about right and the last act is a fair moment to put the kettle on.
