Score: 4 / 5
It's difficult to know how to approach this film, critically, as its marketing has been obsessed with this status of finality. Though we already know the franchise is far from over -- indeed, since this release, New Line and Warner Bros. have confirmed at least one more film and an entire television series -- this will apparently be the last time we see Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga star as Ed and Lorraine Warren. Before we can really talk about this movie in particular, I want to acknowledge that I am very biased regarding this series. I'm aware that the Warrens are controversial figures, and that their ethics of work do not always stand up to scrutiny. But these films only tangentially resemble reality, so I don't think getting caught up in the real stories is either the point nor the power behind what this series is meant to do. These are scary stories with heart, meant as profoundly ideologically conservative exercises in funhouse spectacle, and exegeses beyond that should always first recognize both the aesthetic and commercial purpose inherent in this particular franchise.
As a fan, then, I can't help but feel melancholic about the franchise in general. When it started, I expected Wan & co. to churn out movies quickly, with more regularity and with a planned flow. After all, these were sold to the studio as "case files" from the Warren backlog, dramatizing key hauntings the couple investigated during their career. But the films quickly skirted the confines of reality and burst into Grand Guignol-style, mega-budgeted affairs of jump scares and emotionally fraught melodrama. And I was even digging that! But when the series started looping back on itself, I worried that there was no actual plan to this processional. Much as Wan started franchises like Saw and Insidious before training and letting others take over -- a choice that makes me respect him a ton as a working artist and businessman, if not so much as a storyteller -- the Conjuring titles quickly deteriorated when he stepped aside as main creator. I very much enjoyed the Annabelle and Nun series, as they shaped and reshaped their own generic conventions. But Michael Chaves, handpicked by Wan for reasons I will never understand nor agree with, has now helmed no fewer than four of these films, and they're simply not to my liking.
And, under Chaves's guidance, the franchise has given up on its internal logic and nightmarish structure, its delightful mastery of scare tactics and visual differentiation, and its propulsive momentum. The series deserved a better trajectory and a better finale: more cases based on the Warrens' extraordinary careers and a fictional mythology that actually went somewhere with its fabulous and creepy ideas. And that simply has not (yet) happened. But that's not this film's fault. As an emotional end to the Warrens' story, Last Rites actually succeeds brilliantly. As a standalone film about a spooky haunting handled dramatically by the Warrens as one of their case files, it succeeds significantly better than Chaves's previous titles in this franchise. So let's dive in.
The film opens with a flashback to 1964, only four years before the first film, as Ed and a very pregnant Lorraine investigate a haunted mirror. It's a clever and nicely framed sequence that ends with no small amount of blood and horror as their baby, Judy, is stillborn; seemingly, Lorraine's prayerful begging revives her daughter. While I was at first annoyed by yet another chronological misdirection, the narrative choice is pretty great if we're meant to see this "final" film as an end for the Warrens and a possible start for Judy. Judy, played by various actresses, has weaved in and out of this franchise, but when we are launched twenty-two years forward into the "present day" (1986), she takes a central role as a young woman eager to start her own life with boyfriend Tony (Ben Hardy). Mia Tomlinson brings a complex character to life with a keen understanding of her own dualism: she carries a repressed ability to communicate with the dead, much like her mother's, but she has been taught to bury it and avoid her visions. There will be a reckoning, the genre fan knows, and Lorraine and Judy are going to have to deal with the implications of their gifts.
Fans of -- or, generally, people who know about -- the Warrens will recognize some really well-constructed personal elements to their story in this film. Tony of course does end up sort of taking over the family business after Ed's passing in real life, so his presence here has a ring of predestination to it, even as he literally fumbles his way through his proposal to Judy and becomes part of their climactic investigation into the resurfaced haunted mirror. Ed's heart problems -- caused, you may recall, by a previous encounter with evil -- will indeed kill him, hence his and Lorraine's attempts at retiring from jobs that indeed cause undue cardiac stress. And while the haunted mirror itself, like Malthus and Valak, seems determined to link larger aspects of the Warrens' lives, I can't help but feel disappointed and cheated by this film's refusal to engage with the other primary antagonists of this series.
Oh well. At least we have a new haunting, right? The Smurl haunting is the vehicle for our heroes' final outing, much-fictionalized as it is here, in rustbelt Pennsylvania. The family here is quite large and reinforces, naturally, the common tropes involved in such cases: an overlarge, multigenerational family living uncomfortably near the poverty line, misunderstood children in danger causing rifts in family interdependence, and manipulation of public opinion to spur socioeconomic improvement. Unfortunately, and unlike Wan's successes with the Perrons and Hodgsons, here the family is so thinly written and the house so undetailed that we aren't nearly as engaged with the victims of the haunting as we should be. The whole time, we're preoccupied with the much more fun and sentimental Warrens; it's telling, then, that the notably sexual dynamics of the haunting are so underplayed that my viewing friend didn't even register that it was an element of the horror at play.
But as a Warren story, this movie rocks. Wilson imbues Ed with a spirit-shaken determination to still guide and protect his family, residual of the masculine ethos he has espoused his whole life (caricatured by a painting of John Wayne featured prominently in the set of his house). He wants to still be the crucifix-touting hero even as the needs of his family are changing and needing his gentleness and kindness foremost. Meanwhile, Farmiga's Lorraine has never been less than entrancing onscreen, with her faraway pale eyes and ethereal hands, but here her scene-chewing feels more lived-in and welcome, as an older woman eager to understand and help the large personalities around her in ways only she can. They've always been the main reason for these films, and here they are as good as they've ever been together, clearly respecting and loving each other's formidable talents as characters and as actors. And while their time in the actual investigation takes a delay here (they don't even go to the Smurl residence until over halfway through the film), the screenplay makes the wise decision to showcase elements of their life that don't revolve around screaming and running through cramped houses with Bibles and holy water.
What else can we say? If you love these movies, or even simply enjoy them, this marks a high point in the latter half of the franchise. I wept as the film ended, mostly out of a sense of relief and sentiment, as the film plucked my heartstrings like a familiar fiddle. Though Chaves has woefully misunderstood his assignment in previous entries, here he kind of fucking nails it. Long gone are his grainy, too-shadowed wide shots without substance; though he still does over-rely on CGI, it's less obvious and obnoxious in this than, for example, in the overwrought, almost Dutch Golden Age visual style of the climax in The Devil Made Me Do It. Cinematographer Eli Born (The Boogeyman, Companion, Hellraiser, No One Will Save You) does nice work here, often using period low-res video to help hide the secret terrors he's shooting; his shallow focus and sometimes shaky handheld camera nicely situate us in the period and its limitations. I did not expect to enjoy this feature, formally or generically, nearly as much as I did, though now my concern is really with what the studio is going to continue to do with this material.
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