Sean Parker
Horror fans everywhere are lining up this weekend to see two of their favorite paranormal investigators face their curtain call, as Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga are set to retire their roles as Ed and Lorraine Warren in The Conjuring: Last Rites. It’s been a relatively short twelve years since the world first laid eyes on Wilson and Farmiga in their roles. Still, after four films and a universe of nine films (even if I think The Curse of La Llorona should count), the duo is adding one last curio to their museum, and helping one last family with their powerful poltergeists.
The fourth and final entry of The Conjuring series begins with a flashback to 1964, where we see a young Ed and Lorraine (Orion Smith and Madison Lawler) investigating a haunted mirror. Lorraine, carrying their daughter Judy in the womb, experiences a vision, and the two must head to the hospital to bring their daughter to term. The case goes unfinished.
After twenty-two years and three heart attacks for Ed, we revisit the Warrens during a lecture on their research in Boston. The crowds the two drew throughout the eighties have now dwindled down to a few curious souls, with the continuing cries of “I ain’t afraid of no ghost” overshadowing the Warrens’ life’s work, and Lorraine seems ready to put it in the past and settle down to enjoy the couple’s more resplendent years. Judy (Mia Tomlinson) has started to see visions, but has been able to deal with them with her mom’s guidance. Judy is grown and finally introducing her beau, Tony (Ben Hardy), to her spooky parents. But Ed is feeling the weight of life passing him by as his age begins to dictate that his youth is behind him. He thought they were on a hiatus, but could their ghost-hunting days really be behind them?
As with every film in the series, The Conjuring: Last Rites jostles back and forth between the Warrens’ drama and the horrors of a haunting somewhere in America. The audience is introduced to the Smurl family, a Christian family living in a super confined neighborhood in Pittston, Pennsylvania. After Dawn Smurl (Beau Gadsdon) receives her confirmation, she’s gifted the same mirror the Warrens fought at the start of the film, and almost immediately, it begins to wreak havoc on the family. The Smurls reach out through many channels, but when a mutual friend of The Warrens brings attention to the Smurls’ case, the Warrens head to Pennsylvania to investigate.
Believe it or not, The Conjuring: Last Rites is not the first time The Warrens have met the Pittston-based Smurl family on film. In 1991, the first celluloid appearance of Ed and Lorraine Warren was by Stephen Markle and Diane Baker in a made-for-TV movie that featured The Mist’s Jeffrey DeMunn and Two Evil Eyes’ Sally Kirkland. The Haunted isn’t exactly essential viewing, and much of the ground it treads is similar, even if the details are vastly different. However, one thing it seems to do better than its counterpart is make it more patently clear that at this time, the church’s views on exorcism were changing, adding to the tumult of the Smurl case. While director Michael Chaves’ Last Rites is filled with atmosphere for a more cinematic experience, there is something enchanting about the lost TV movie that may appeal to Conjuring fans.
Speaking of Chaves, The Conjuring: Last Rites marks his third contribution as director in The Conjuring Universe, beginning with the passive uncounted entry The Curse of La Llorona before taking over for Wan in The Conjuring’s third entry, and he returned to the universe again for 2023’s The Nun II. While the director has maintained a similar tone and created some intensely stylistic moments, there has been an unevenness to the past two entries in The Conjuring films that did not exist in James Wan’s tighter early entries. Last Rites may be the best entry in Chaves’ Conjuring filmography, but it’s a long way off from the horror onslaught fans were led into when Wan brought us to the Perrons’ farmhouse back in 2013.
In the first two films of the series, Wan’s rhythm for tending to the Warrens’ exposition was well paced with jumps and frights of the family being haunted or possessed, then well blended as Ed and Lorraine tended to the family. In these last two entries, the back and forth has become somewhat elongated, and the slow ratcheting of the tension seeps in less as the family stories seem more disconnected. Last Rites does a far better job than The Devil Made Me Do It, but there’s still a lot of focus on the Warrens’ troubles. Because of this, the film takes an extremely long time before it ever introduces the Warrens to the Smurls. For a time, it almost feels like the Smurls are just running in circles while we wait for the Warrens’ exposition to keep up.
Last Rites also adds in a star-studded send-off of past characters from the previous films in its finale. The notion of which brings reminiscence of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, as the film seems to end a couple of times, but can’t help but provide a thank you via epilogue fan service. While it’s a sweet little love letter to the fans, it really doesn’t add much but time to the film itself.
When it comes to scares, The Conjuring films have always been ahead of the curve. However, Last Rites rarely lives up to those expectations. There are a few that will chill you to the bone, including a priest’s deathly vision featuring a chilling voice on the end of a phone call, or the Resident Evil: Village adjacent scene of everyone’s favorite demon doll Annabelle morphing into an oversized monster. But even if my blood pressure was increased slightly in these moments, I never felt that permeable sensation of my heart beating against my ribcage in terror, nor was my empathy for the Smurls’ or Warrens’ situations increased. Many of the lead-in scares felt reused from the older films. Perhaps it’s designed as an homage, but the ghostly phone cord scene felt a little like a rehash of Lili Taylor’s hand-clap hide-and-seek, and a basement painting of John Wayne steals a page out of The Nun handbook.
Overall, when it comes to sending off The Warrens, I think they deserved a little better than what they got from The Conjuring: Last Rites. While it’s droves better than The Devil Made Me Do It, it never holds a candle to the first two installments. Some scenes unintentionally made me laugh, a quality of Chaves’ films that has persisted since my first viewing of The Curse of La Llorona. While Last Rites has some intense moments, fans are only going to feel slightly more impressed because of how disappointed they were by the previous entry. If you are a Conjuring fan hoping for a big reprieve with Last Rites, this ending may sting a little.
The Conjuring: Last Rites is now playing in theaters everywhere.
The Conjuring: Last Rites | Official Trailer
Discover why this case ended it all. #TheConjuring: Last Rites – Only in Theaters September 5. From New Line Cinema comes the ninth entry in the more than $2 billion theatrical Conjuring universe, The Conjuring: Last Rites, directed by franchise veteran Michael Chaves and produced by franchise architects James Wan and Peter Safran.
