The Conjuring’s final chapter mixes horror and syrupy soap opera

THE CONJURING: LAST RITES
★★
MA. 130 minutes.

The Conjuring franchise surely wouldn’t have lasted over a decade if the films didn’t scare people, and the supposedly final chapter in the saga, directed by Michael Chaves, has some moderately effective set-pieces involving creepy dolls, dark cupboards, and broken mirrors. Still, the question has to be asked, are these really horror movies?

Still more than its predecessors, The Conjuring: Last Rites feels for much of its overlong running time like a syrupy soap opera, founded very loosely on the actual lives of self-styled paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga).

The action occurs in 1986, meaning that the loving marriage of this devoutly Catholic pair has endured for over four decades. For the sake of his heart and her mental stability, they’ve taken a step back from direct confrontation with demons – but they have other things to worry about, mostly related to their now adult daughter Judy (played here by Mia Tomlinson, the second time the role has been recast).

Judy has inherited her mother’s psychic abilities, but Lorraine fears this may be more a curse than a blessing. In the meantime, Ed is more perturbed by his daughter’s engagement to a well-meaning ex-cop (Ben Hardy) – news which prompts him to ponder his own mortality along with the fact that she’s no longer daddy’s little girl.

For some families, the answer to all this might be therapy. But for the Warrens, the only way forward is for Ed and Lorraine to call a halt to their retirement and go investigate yet another haunted house, with Judy joining them at work for the first time ever.

But the film takes forever to reach this destination. For the first hour or more, we cut between the Warrens and the Smurls, the larger, poorer and more chaotic family living in the haunted house in question.

Here again there are a couple of daughters who appear to be growing up fast – but the film doesn’t manage to do much either with the hints of Freudian subtext or with the parallels between the two households more generally.

While their characters are meant to be on the cusp of old age, Wilson and Farmiga remain far more glamorous than their real-life counterparts. In particular, the conventionally handsome Wilson bears absolutely no resemblance to the real Ed Warren, whose vibe in archival footage is nearer what you might associate with a 1970s porn producer.

But that’s par for the course where Hollywood is concerned – and much less of a worry than the closing title card stating that the pioneering work of the Warrens helped make paranormal research more acceptable to mainstream science.

In case of any doubt, it should be stated for the record that the kind of “research” undertaken by the Warrens has no mainstream scientific credibility at all, nor has demonology grown any more respectable as a branch of study. The willingness of Chaves and his team to encourage a naive sub-section of the audience to believe otherwise is easily the film’s most unsettling element.

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