With Ed Warren (Patrick Wilson) on notice from his doctor given a history of heart attacks, he and his wife, Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) have put their paranormal investigation on pause.  The spirits from beyond, however, are not done with the Warrens, and when a family in West Pittston find their house haunted by a series of vengeful ghosts, the Warrens will be lured from their home and drawn back in for one final encounter with the supernatural. 

Director Michael Chaves chronicles the Warren’s final investigation in The Conjuring: Last Rites, a 135-minute film that is being framed as the final entry into James Wan’s Atomic Monster and Warner Brothers‘ modem horror anthology based on the Warren’s real-life accounts.  Frequent horror scribes Ian Goldberg, Richard Naing, and David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick all collaborate on the script proving a story that has to balance the dramatic conclusion to Ed and Lorraine’s careers hunting cursed objects while also providing audiences with the same quality of scares and unsettling environment that they have come to expect from this franchise. 

The film opens in flashback with a younger Ed (Orion Smith) and a very pregnant Lorraine (Madison Lawlor) who were called to a curio shop to examine a strange mirror.  The piece is carved from heavy, old wood, adorned with the busts of three angels, sitting atop the mirror like a crown.  What lurks behind the glass of the mirror is far from heavenly, however, and when Lorraine reaches out to touch it, the glass shatters and sends the woman into extreme pain.  Racing to the hospital, the baby is born without a heart beat, revived only through the desperate power of prayer; the first of many instances that mark Last Rites as a film with heavier-than-to-be-expected religious overtones, even beyond the quippy double entendre of the subtitle. 

From there, we transition to the film proper, introducing us to the Smurl family as they celebrate their eldest daughter, Heather’s (Kíla Lord Cassidy) confirmation.  As a gift from her grandparents, Mary (Kate Fahy) and John (Peter Wight), she receives a mirror; the same mirror in which Lorraine encountered twenty-two years prior, a mirror which still harbors unnatural and vengeful spirits within.  Their trials are cut short in favor of a shared narrative with the Ed and Lorraine we have come to know from the franchise, represented by Wilson and Farmiga, with the addition of Judy (Mia Tomlinson), their miracle baby and her boyfriend Tony (Ben Hardy).  It is a classic case of dueling narratives where in the competition for screen time, neither end up being wholly satisfying.  Thankfully, for horror heads, Last Rites does still revel in some of the unsettling atmosphere which Wan’s franchise has made a hallmark of, though, through its growth, has become saddled with an unsavory pop element akin to the stylings of Ryan Murphy.  This sense of playing into the fads is only amplified when Annabelle, a haunted doll that has become something of the de facto mascot for the franchise, begins to play a larger and larger role in a film that she ultimately has no true business being involved. 

For Last Rites, we witness the haunting of the Smurl family as a host of ghosts terrorize the small Catholic family in the northeast industrial suburbs of Pennsylvania.  The problem with this haunting – a family of ghosts: Abner (Leigh Jones), his wife, and his mother-in-law – is that it is rather lackluster both in their poltergeist actions and the overall depth of the lore.  That being said, the practical nature of the phone cord haunt makes for a nice parallel with the simple clapping of the hands that terrorized the Perron family in The Conjuring (2013). The major problem is that the trio of ghosts have no connection to the mirror, but rather the parcel of land on which the Smurl house has been built.  Generations prior, it was all farm land, and Abner, catching his wife in an affair, is blinded by rage killing his family and then himself.  This, in addition to Abner being the only ghost to truly make himself known, it feels truly like the Smurls and the Warrens are fighting against thin air, here. The fated farm family have already been in the house, but what spurred them into action was the addition of the mirror which is possessed by an unnamed demonic entity.  Splitting the already divided narrative attention to two different hauntings spreads the scares quite thin, and the ghosts, which actually have some narrative interest behind them, are largely used as props in favor of the demon which is pitifully explained and even more pitifully deployed.  Existing only through the mirror, the Warrens spend much of the third act screaming incoherently at nothing.  It is a real whimpering display for the storied franchise and offers little excitement and even less of a sense of danger for the characters. 

There is, however, a neat component which Chaves deploys as the demon taunts its victims.  Eli Born’s camera will slowly pan around a central point and then either return to or make another deliberate movement, and in lieu of a jump scare, the room which we are in changes ever so slightly; the shadows grow deeper, the rooms fall colder.  This pattern is established early on in the flashback when Lorraine is in labor and sees an old crone ghost (Gabrielle Downey) crawling towards her, and later with Judy in the – admittedly inherently terrifying – mirrored closet at the dress shop.  These are all mostly harmless examples, but Chaves ramps up the violence when he returns to this technique at the Arch Dioceses offices with Father Gordon (Steve Coulter) whose encounter with this demon leads him to wrap a vacuum cord around his neck and hang himself from the balcony.  His death is ultimately what leads the Warrens to Pennsylvania where in the showdown, Chaves sets up one of the most intriguing versions of this scare… and then scraps it all together before it reaches its true climax.  It involves the newly financed Tony, a retired cop who we learn left the force after a close encounter with an armed man and a fluke jamming of a shotgun which narrowly saved his life.  The demon changes the Smurl’s neighborhood to that of where he was responding to the police call and then sets Tony to task at knocking and seeking entrance into the house all over again.  It is frightening, and it is finally working with a character and back story in a satisfying way, but then as quickly as it started, the curse is broken and Chaves sets the stage for a limp and poorly conceived finale. Even as things are ramping up, Chaves never delivers that final outburst that helps to define what it is the Warrens are up against besides, which, to us in the safety of our auditorium seats, is by all accounts just a mirror. 

Many of the issues with The Conjuring: Last Rites stem from being, at is core, something of a biopic for the Warrens.  This means that in addition to balancing two ghost stories, it also needs to balance a second plot focused on the family drama.  It is simply too much to put of the shoulders of this film, and it leaves Gregory Plotkin and Elliot Greenberg in the edit with way too much narrative to sort through and not enough scares especially given how mishandled Abner is treated on the page in favor of the nameless entity in the mirror.  At over two hours, Last Rites hardly moves with any real intention, and while it can be said that perhaps it was going for more of a potboiler thriller that lands its scares with a simmering and unsettling tension, that is thrown out the door once the finale hits and the camera is thrashing around creating the same blurry slop that detracts from the pivotal set pieces of many modern action movies.  The Smurl story could not be easily told this deep into the franchise without framing it around the Warrens, and with it being their final investigation before retirement, it makes for an easy choice for the franchise capper which also lends credence as to why so much of their family and personal life is explored across the film’s runtime. It is just deeply unfortunate that a better balance could not have been achieved and made for a rightful end to one of modern horror’s most enduring and carefully crafted mainstays.