Un-Conjure your Expectations for “The Conjuring: Last Rites”

I’m gonna spoil something for you. I thought The Conjuring: Last Rites was good. Like, I rate it “Good” at the end of this review. Yeah, it’s a Conjuring movie. Yeah, the one with Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga. I liked it.

I mean, what did you expect?

I don’t say this very often, but I tend to rate movies based on what they were trying to be, rather than what we wanted them to be. A movie like The Inheritance was bad because it wanted to be a haunted house slasher film, much like Ready or Not, but wasn’t very haunted, wasn’t very slasher, and wasn’t very film. A movie like Nightbitch was wonderful because it didn’t treat us like children when explaining a complex concept. I thought The Drama was weird because I wasn’t sure why it was talking about a complex subject. I considered Mortal Kombat II excellent because it was unapologetic about its shlokiness and leaned into the goof. A movie like In the Lost Lands loses credibility because it’s trying to be so earnest about its camp. 

So say you tell me that there’s a movie about ghosts where two paranormal detectives have to help the family be rid of their poltergeist, but they have to do it when they come together as a family, and also Jesus Christ. I ask, did we get all that?

Yeah, dude. In aces.

Did earlier set ups in this film regarding Ed Warren’s new heart condition come into play? Kinda. But only as far as they did in Conjuring 2 with Lorraine’s visions of him dying on a tree branch. (I add this in retrospect, because maybe you haven’t seen Conjuring 2, but in it, Lorrain has a vision of Ed dying on a tree branch.) (We’re now two movies past that vision.)

Was the Warren family particularly fractured and need to find a way to come together for the climax? Nah, the Warrens were lovely to each other. Did the haunted family come together to defeat the ghost? No, the haunted family ran off so the stars of the movie (the Warrens) could have a big Avengers team up. But was the movie scary? This Conjuring movie was what all other Conjuring movies are. They are.

I mean, you’re wrong to walk into a Conjuring or Insidious movie expecting anything introspective or clever. It’s all dumb tension happening in the dark to damsels in distress, paired with a handful of jumpscares.

Naturally, I loved it. 

A Touch of Heart

I also thought this movie was funnier than usual. Patrick Wilson gets to pretend to be a dad in the 80’s who’s got pseudo-liberal ideas about his daughter and her new fiance. They have a decent dynamic, where Wilson knows he’s scaring the kid, but is definitely still giving him a chance to prove himself to be ‘worthy’ of the daughter Warren. We also got cameos from some characters from the other characters in the series, which I thought was a nice touch if they’re committing to not having Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson return. Sorta like a nice goodbye. It felt like an amount of effort the filmmakers didn’t need to go through, but I appreciate that they did.

There’s not much else I can say here. I also watched the third Annabelle movie a few nights later, and I gotta say, The Conjuring: Last Rites is one of the best films in this series. It doesn’t leave you too dissatisfied. Hell, they even had the self-restraint to not get too cliche with the magic mirror showing you something creepy in the reflection. I commend that.

Like I said, I rated The Conjuring: Last Rites

GOOD

I saw The Conjuring: Last Rites on HBO.

Wondering how my rating system works? Let me explain!