Over the past couple years, my opinions on the Conjuring cinematic universe have gone from strength to strength. To the point where I’m likely in the minority for such things, given how favourably I’ve been towards the recent run of spin-off features. I still maintain that the first two Annabelle movies are a hard pass, but The Nun, The Curse Of The Weeping Woman, and even Annabelle Comes Home are still in my good books at the time of writing this.
As such, I was reasonably looking forward to the new mainline Conjuring film, albeit slightly taken aback by the real-life inspiration this time around (making it about a real-life murder case hits a bad note that just a haunted house doesn’t manage). But it turns out that I was looking in entirely the wrong direction as far as misgivings with this feature, sad to say.
James Wan isn’t in the director’s chair this time around, sticking to a producing role and a story credit, with Weeping Woman director Michael Chaves taking over. Now, while again admitting my fringe perspective on this, I was fine with his approach to horror filmmaking, especially for his first turn in the hot seat. However, the difference between Wan and Chaves, particularly when it comes to the main Conjuring aesthetic, turns out to be night and day.
The attempts at period detail in the visuals and general production values are so slight, they’re basically non-existent, making the specificity of the setting all but pointless. Same goes for the sunburnt camera stock, which only shows up sporadically here during some of the more intense scenes, and the scares on their own aren’t much of anything. They land on the right side of jump-scares, but even then, it feels tame compared to what has already been shown, even within the spin-offs.
It doesn’t help that this whole thing feels like just another chapter in the larger story, when at this point, the filmmakers should be aiming for something a bit more substantial. It honestly gets to the point where Annabelle Comes Home, the Captain America: Civil War of the franchise, is a more fitting Conjuring 3 than this turns out to be. Part of that is down to the main supernatural event, here being a teenager who falls under the curse of a Satanist, where the actual case itself takes up far less of the narrative focus than it initially lets on. Admittedly, making the whole film about the court case would’ve just turned this into a higher-budget Suing The Devil, and bringing the sketchiness of the inspiration into the foreground, but what we actually get isn’t exactly riveting.
This isn’t helped by the marketing, up to and including sequences that are straight-up missing from the final product. When you promise trippy mirror scenes, you damn well better deliver trippy mirror scenes. The fact that that moment is even foreshadowed in the introductory exorcism scene just makes the final product look that much more slapped together; not gonna lie, I got some real Lights Out vibes from that.
Now, that isn’t to say that this is all-out bad. The acting is still top-notch (although I admit bias, as I’ve gotten to the point where I will happily watch Patrick Wilson in anything) and when it pushes for fright, it has enough tension to deliver it more times than not. However, not only is the dialogue being spoken noticeably worse (the lack of the Hayes brothers’ involvement is definitely felt here), but there’s such a lack of tangible atmosphere that it isn’t able to maintain the tension created by those few moments. There’s nothing here that carries the same punch as the ‘clap clap’ scenes from the first film or the Nun portrait scene from the second.
And in a way, I almost wish this was as bad as something like the first Annabelle movie, because the sheer drop-off in entertainment from the other Conjuring films (even the spin-offs, say what you will about them) is a brand of disappointment that somehow hurts even worse than someone trying to make a faulty elevator seem scary and failing miserably. I’ve been more than willing to stick with the Conjuring Universe thus far, but this is where it officially starts to feel like the whole thing is running on fumes.
No comments:
Post a Comment