The Conjuring franchise has, in the twelve years since the first movie came out, become a bit of a benchmark for blockbuster horror. Which is why it comes as such a surprise that the fourth and final instalment in the series, Last Rites, is such complete and utter dogshit.
Directed by Michael Chavez (the man behind the surprisingly respectable third movie, The Devil Made Me Do It, and The Curse of La Llorona, which we’ll do him the kindness of not talking about here), Last Rites once again follows the Warrens (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) as they return to ghost-busting after the strange occurrences afflicting a family in Pennsylvania force them to confront demons from their past. Functionally, a grab-bag of keywords thrown together in the vague shape of a Conjuring movie, but the formulaic nature of the previous entries into this series have not stood in the way of those stories being pretty damn entertaining.
But Last Rites is a truly baffling missing of the point when it comes to what has made these movies as successful as they are. It might not be re-inventing the (extremely Catholic) wheel, but these movies never claimed to, at least in terms of the classic horror framework they follow – in the best version of the Conjuring series, those classic tropes are buffed to a shine with great performances and strong direction, and that is more than enough.
But what we get here is an appallingly-paced, decidedly muddy horror story tacked in the most perfunctory fashion on to the back end of a plot about the Warren family. The glacial first act of the bloated 135-minute runtime is one of the most truly baffling examples of misunderstanding what the audience is looking for I’ve ever seen – I don’t know how to say this, but when I think of The Conjuring movies, I’m not pondering on how Judy Warren (Mia Tomlinson) got engaged, or how good Ed Warren is at ping-pong, or what Lorraine is ordering at their favourite restaurant, you know? Yes, the relationship between Ed and Lorraine is at the centre of these stories, but it’s a pin around which to tell a great bit of haunted house horror, not an excuse for domestic fluff that drags out to nearly a full hour of screentime.
And then there’s the actual matter of the haunting itself, which is devoid of the interesting procedural elements that made the first few films so entertaining. The nature of the demon pursuing the Warrens is never really explained, the ghosts that the film chucks up for the sake of a good trailer sting look like I could have sketched them on the back of a napkin after one too many cold brews, the scares themselves feel more like a handwave of necessity than an actual attempt to unsettle. Someone burped quite loudly during my showing, and it was the most surprised I was through the entire runtime, and that’s just not right.
Once the demon has been readily (and vaguely) dispatched, Last Rites descends into an unforgivably indulgent epilogue that’s so cheesy as to turn into outright comedy. Judy gets married, and the camera pans to the pews to show the victims of the previous movies there to smile beatifically – I was fully expecting to see the Enfield Poltergeist waving from the second row. It closes out with a ham-fisted attempt to paper over the decided cracks in the Warrens’ real-life legacy, and by the time the credits roll, I was thanking my lucky stars that there were no more cases for this franchise to take a swing at.
Last Rites is a truly dreadful movie, a boring, muddy, and profoundly indulgent mess that does no justice to the franchise as a whole. Ironically, it’s perhaps the closest the series has come to capturing my feelings towards the real-life Warrens – which is entirely a waste of everyone’s fucking time.
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By Lou MacGregor
(header image via Hollywood Reporter)
No But Listen 