"This is based on a true story."Maybe that's the kiss of death for The Conjuring and movies like it. Horror films that profess to tell a story of a real-life haunting are rarely effective, since they're usually afraid to create their own world in which demonic possessions and hauntings exist, and are left to attempt to convince us that they exist in this world. I get the sense that director James Wan really wanted to have fun with this story, but was limited by the "true-life" account of what happened.
The movie's limitations were no doubt dictated by Lorraine Warren, a demonologist and rare lay authority on demonic possession in the Catholic Church. She was a consultant on this film and is also a character played by Vera Farmiga. Lorraine and her husband Ed (Patrick Wilson) consult on supernatural occurrences and, in some cases, refer them to the Vatican for exorcism. When a family movies into a Harrisville, Rhode Island, home and is set upon by a malevolent supernatural force, Lorraine and Ed are called to the rescue.
The movie starts off well. It's clear that Wan is at home in the haunted house movie, rather than the gory Saw movies that gave him his start. He's adept at building spooky tension based on limited points of view. He calls our attention to the blurry peripheries where things are happening that the characters don't see. And in one masterful scene, he gives us a character who sees something in the dark that we don't, but through that character we still sense it.
The movie's first half is a gleeful celebration of creaking sounds in the night, voices in the dark, shapes under sheets, things behind the door, and an especially creepy porcelain doll that I'll be expecting under my bed shortly. Lili Taylor and Ron Livingston are believable as the unsuspecting parents, and I liked their massive family of five daughters and how each is affected in a different way by the haunting. I enjoyed the Poltergeist-like contraptions that Ed and Lorraine use to capture evidence of the ghost, like the thermostat-rigged cameras that go off whenever there's a temperature change in the room.
Once all the action is set into motion, the movie has nowhere to bring it. The backstory behind the ghost that haunts the house is perfunctory and dull. The big climactic exorcism is a total dud. Vomit is spewed, blood is thrown around, Latin is shouted, and pretty much everything you expect from a movie exorcism is done, nothing more. The movie seems afraid to make too many fireworks, possibly because it doesn't want to stray too far from the actual events, possibly because the sequel has already been greenlighted.
I think the movie's biggest sin, however, is the introduction of a room at the Warrens' house that's filled with possessed objects from the numerous homes they've visited. They include the aforementioned creepy doll, as well as a Genghis Khan-like statue and one of those stuffed monkeys that plays the cymbals. In a world in which Cabin in the Woods exists, there is no place for a movie in which all of these things do not come alive by the end. The movie teases us with that prospect several times, but it doesn't come through. Just as with an on-screen gun, a creepy doll introduced in the first act needs to come alive and kill someone by the third.
** out of ****
