‘The Conjuring: Last Rites’ Review
The Warrens are back and the rules are less clear than ever.
THE CONJURING: LAST RIGHTS is frequently pretty effective in that it accomplishes what it sets out to do: create a creepy atmosphere and make you involuntarily spasm when a loud noise or a scary face flashes onto the screen. The problem, for me, is that I’m simply not that interested in what it’s setting out to do.
This is also how I felt back in 2013 after reviewing the first film in the series—which followed Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) as paranormal investigators trying to save a family from the vengeful spirit of a baby-killing witch—leading to me more or less ignoring the two sequels, the three movies in the Annabelle spinoff series, the two Nun movies, and The Curse of La Llorona. Enormously successful series! I do not begrudge the studio or the creatives their success, nor the audiences their scares. Just not for me.
The Conjuring: Last Rites opens with a flashback to the birth of Ed and Lorraine’s daughter (played by Mia Tomlinson as an adult). While investigating a spoooooky mirror, a demon reaches out and touches the very pregnant Lorraine, who is shocked into an early birth. At first, it looks as though the demon has claimed the soul of the baby, but fear not: She lives. And she has her mother’s ability to see evil spirits.
Two decades later, the spooooooky mirror shows up again, this time in the home of the Smurl family. One of the Smurl daughters receives it as a gift following her first communion and weird things immediately begin happening: a light fixture collapses, wounding one of the children; an evil presence starts pulling on telephone cords; and grown men start levitating on beds. Needless to say, the Warrens will be called in to help.
But it takes a very long time for them to be called in, and this is The Conjuring: Last Rites’s biggest weakness. Yes, it does all the jump-scare stuff perfectly adequately, and yes, those moments are sprinkled in at appropriately timed intervals. (I imagine producer James Wan, who worked on most of the movies in this franchise as well as most of the Saw movies, has a big chart somewhere in his office mapping out precisely when and where these heart-rate spikes need to appear to maximize terror depending on the run time.) It just feels like everyone’s spinning their wheels for a while as the Smurls suffer their torments and the Warrens meet their daughter’s boyfriend.
One rarely profits by considering the logic behind anything that happens in a movie like this—the answer as to why one thing works when another thing doesn’t is, roughly, “magic,” which is never satisfying—but I will say that I couldn’t really figure out the “rules” for any of the hauntings or how to disperse them and banish the spirits back to hell, or wherever. It’s not obvious to me why some hauntings affect everyone while the visions encountered by Lorraine and her daughter are made to simply disappear by closing her eyes and wishing them away. Nor is it particularly obvious why the Bible verses that do, eventually, dispel the evil spirits work when they work, and why they weren’t invoked earlier.
I don’t mean to be difficult and it is, perhaps, beside the point—again, director Michael Chaves is very good at the whole “look up and see a scary face thing,” which is harder than it sounds to pull off—but I found myself wondering on at least two separate occasions precisely why a character was dangling from a noose. The mechanics of possession are never thoroughly explained, it all just kind of happens.
But then, what is life but a series of things happening? The things that happen in The Conjuring: Last Rites are appropriate for the film and the mood it’s trying to set. And this is the paranormal, after all. Ghosts and ghouls and demons are, by their nature, mysterious. Perhaps we shouldn’t ask too much of the story.
Besides: Who needs rules when we’ve got spooky, rotten faces to shove on the screen?
There was a brief moment in “The Departed,” where Vera and Matt Damon flirt when I wished they could whisk themselves away to a different movie where their spark could ignite into a romance. That magnetism between the actors is sorely missed during these anti-romantic times.
Not that it matters, it's pretty well established even amongst many diehards in the para-community that the Warrens were self-promoting frauds. I actually heard them speak when I was in college in the late-70's about the Amityville house, a demon-infestation story long ago debunked. But a ghost-demon horror film is what it is, it's just unfortunate that these performative bad-spirit-exterminators could enjoy popular entertainment validation in 2025, albeit posthumously.