The Conjuring

Okay, time for the unpopular opinion: I don’t like The Conjuring.  Everyone knows the spin-off sucks (update: the reaction to Annabelle 2, released the same weekend I’m editing and uploading this for later posting, has been better), and I somewhat enjoyed the second film.  But the original is just unenjoyable to me.  My problems boil down to three things:

* I don’t buy Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) or their worldview.  It’s a black-and-white way of looking at the world that kills my suspension of disbelief.  This is a personal thing, yes, but if God, the Devil, demons, and angels are all real, I think they have more interesting things to do than knocking on a door three times, over and over again, to mock their opposing faction.

*While the era was great at producing horror movies, I find that horror movies set in the 1970s often don’t work.  It’s something about the hair and the clothes.  The entire world just looks unreal to me, like a sitcom with no budget for wardrobe.

*More specific to this movie, we get the parts of both a serious thriller and a B-movie.  We spend most of the film building up with investigation of the paranormal, and then get a cheesy, over-the-top CGI-fest of a climax.

Now, this isn’t to say that there aren’t scary moments.  There certainly are, and I honestly would have preferred that the movie stick to its boring but creepy dramatic route.  Many real-world haunting stories are scary because they ultimately don’t make a lot of sense, while The Conjuring movies seem quite determined to wrap things up in a neat little package, even when the actual events that inspired the movie were far less clear-cut.

Roger and Carolyn Perron (Ron Livingston and Lili Taylor) move into an old farm house with their five children.  Strange events start happening, with the usual knocks, movements, and kids reporting imaginary friends.  There is a particularly frightening sequence in which Carolyn plays a version of hide-and-seek called “three claps” with one of her daughters, and finds herself drawn into another room by an unexplained clap.

Ed and Lorraine are called on the scene, however, and ironically do exactly what they always did in real life: give everything that happens a demonic explanation in terms of their interpretation of Catholic theology.  Rather than the male ghost indicated earlier, we now have a nominally female demon who possessed a previous owner of the property and forced her to kill her own baby in a sacrifice to the devil (but for some reason they keep referring to the demon as “Bathsheba,” the name of the woman).

In the final act, the witch possesses Carolyn Perron in an attempt to kill her children.  This kills any remaining suspension of belief as suddenly every half-baked theory the Warrens put forward is completely confirmed, and all ambiguity is gone.  It also turns the evil force into something that can be tangibly fought, as Ed Warren attempts to perform an exorcism himself.

This is something the real Ed Warren claims to have done, but I know enough about exorcisms to know they’re never really the fast epiphany therapy movies portray.  Here, however, we get the standard gross-out, hurt the victim, and it’s all fixed by the power of love ending.  It’s too tangible, too easy, and generally too Hollywood for a truly scary movie.

So, do I recommend The Conjuring? No.  I didn’t like it in theatres, and I don’t like it now.  Whether you want drama or B-movie, there are far better choices available.  The Conjuring 2 is among them.