Producers: James Wan and Peter Safran Director: Michael Chaves Screenplay: Ian Goldberg, Richard Naing and David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick Cast: Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Mia Tomlinson, Ben Hardy, Rebecca Calder, Elliot Cowan, Kila Lord Cassidy, Beau Gadsdon, Molly Cartwright, John Brotherton, Steve Coulter, Shannon Kook, Peter Wight and Kate Fahy Distributor: Warner Bros.
Grade: C-
“Anything can happen, and it probably will.” Those words are spoken by Ed Warren (Patrick Wilson) in the last act of this fourth movie in “The Conjuring” franchise (the ninth if you count the various spinoffs), but it might have been the mantra of Ian Goldberg, Richard Naing and David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick, whose screenplay for “Last Rites,” as it’s subtitled, is so loaded down with horror-movie tropes that eventually the movie collapses under the weight. Simply put, it turns a rather simple haunted-house story into something that’s overloaded, overwrought and overlong. And to make matters worse, the result isn’t remotely scary.
The script is based on a well-known haunting that supposedly plagued the Smurl family in suburban Pennsylvania in the seventies and eighties. The incident was, in fact, the subject of not just news reporting, but a 1991 TV movie, “The Haunted,” in which the Warrens (a solemn Stephen Markle and Diane Baker) played a supporting role. Even by the standards of the time, it was a sober account of the affair, seemingly “accurate” in terms of presenting things from the Smurls’ perspective. It was, as a result, rather dull in a post-“Exorcist” age.
“Sober” is a word that could hardly be used to describe “Rites,” which has recentered the story on the Warrens, not just Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) and Ed (Patrick Wilson) but their daughter Judy (Mia Tomlinson) and her fiancé Tony Spera (Ben Hardy). It begins with a flashback to the couple’s first case back in the mid-sixties involving a cursed, full-sized mirror that so terrifies them that they run away from it. The experience affects Lorraine’s pregnancy, and her delivery is difficult, with the baby girl stillborn for a full minute before springing to life.
Two decades later, Judy has inherited her mother’s clairvoyant ability and intuits the turmoil in the Smurl household—apparitions, creepy dolls, poltergeist intrusions, levitations, etc.—that can be traced to that cursed mirror, which Grandpa and Gramma Smurl (Peter Wight and Kate Fahy) have bought for the Smurl girls (Kila Lord Cassidy, Beau Gadsdon and Molly Cartwright). When the kids try to throw it out, it extracts a terrible vengeance on one of them even as it’s demolished in a garbage truck. And, of course, it returns from the debris to somehow take up residence in the attic.
Despite the pleas of devout Catholics Jack (Elliot Cowan) and Janet (Rebecca Calder), the church does little to help their family until Father Gordon (Steve Coulter), the Warrens’ long-time clerical confidante, intervenes. The Warrens decline to get involved, citing their exhaustion from the demonology business—their only participation now is delivering sparsely-attended lectures to incredulous college kids—and their emphasis on their home life, with entirely too much of the running-time devoted to Ed’s semi-grumpy “Father of the Bride” attitude toward the suitor seeking his blessing to wed his little girl. But when the good reverend himself goes to the Smurls and then is murdered, Judy’s intuition kicks in, and it’s her decision to get involved that draws her parents and her groom-to-be to the Smurl home as well.
It’s not the fact that the actual Judy Warren never played a part in her parents’ paranormal adventures that’s irritating about all this; after all, the series has never claimed even the vestiges of a documentary. The problem, from a narrative perspective, is that when Gordon, and then the Warrens, show up at the Smurl house, “Last Rites” goes full bore into a barrage of horror-movie tropes so insistent and overwhelming that the movie turns into self-parody, throwing in everything but the kitchen sink. (My apologies: at one point Lorraine’s garbage disposal backs up and spews out a torrent of blood that makes you think it was a cousin of the elevator in the Overlook Hotel.)
Anyway, we get innumerable shots of people walking through dark rooms alone, flashlight in hand; sudden appearances by spectral figures, always accompanied by the shattering crash of Benjamin Wallfisch’s score in the usual jump-scare fashion; other ghostly apparitions, including a hulking farmer with a malevolent grin and an axe poised to strike; dolls that become animated and assume the guise of menaces; and an unfinished attic floor that threatens to collapse as heroes bearing that heavy, cursed mirror try to traverse it over slender wooden beams set down as a path. There’s even the worst horror imaginable: a car that won’t start when it’s needed.
The avalanche of such stuff is meant to ratchet up the fear quotient—Wallfisch’s pounding music certainly indicates as much—but it’s more likely to provoke giggles than screams, especially since editors Gregory Plotkin and Elliot Greenberg have trouble keeping the various elements even vaguely coherent in the muddle; the result feels like several episodes of “Supernatural” mashed up in a blender that’s slightly off-kilter—which might not matter if it were genuinely frightening. But despite all the hubbub “Last Rites” turns out to be as boring as “The Haunted” was back in 1991.
Along the way there’s some attempt to explain what’s happening. Lorraine points to a demon acting through the mirror that has awakened the spirits of a troubled family that once lived on the land on which the Smurl house was built and forcing them do its bidding; the purpose is apparently to lure the Warrens back into the battle they once abandoned. (In this Warren-centered scenario the Smurls are just unfortunate collateral damage.) But the demon can apparently wander about on its own well outside the house, too; it invades the store where Judy is trying on her wedding dress, which allows for one of those multiple-mirror mazelike sequences that directors love, as well as the diocesan office where Father Gordon is murdered with the help of a floor buffer.
The movie does have some strengths, of course. Farmiga and Wilson try to add some nuance to their aging investigators, with the latter accentuating references to Ed’s heart problems and the former his wife’s concern about his wellbeing. (The lecture scene in which derisive students use “Ghostbusters” to ridicule them justifies their world-weary withdrawal from their work, too.) Tomlinson actually does much of the heavy lifting here and manages well enough, though the character is often portrayed as out of her depth; and Hardy makes a pleasantly supportive partner for her. Of the supporting cast only Coulter manages to make much of an impression; despite getting a good deal of running-time, the Smurls emerge as a bland bunch as their story is pretty much shunted to the background in favor of emphasis on the Warrens. On the technical side, production designer John Frankish has provided appropriately gloomy settings, handsomely festooned with period detail (notice the programs featured on the TV sets), and Eli Born’s cinematography ably contrasts the sitcomish colors of the Warren household in the early going with the darkly burnished atmosphere of the Smurl home in the final act.
“Last Rites” is being advertised as the last installment of the “Conjuring” series, but at its close Ed takes Tony on a tour of the locked chamber in the Warren home where they’ve stashed all the cursed and satanic objects they’ve collected over the years. He tosses the key to his son-in-law-to-be and says, “Welcome to the family business.” The words might elicit a subdued “Uh-oh” from viewers. Even without any claim to clairvoyance, one can sense a hint of a prospective next-generation spin-off in the minds of producers Wan and Safran.