Since there is a third Conjuring movie coming out this week, I might as well check in with the second movie. I did like the first one though I as with that review, I won’t be using this space to debate whether or not Ed and Lorraine Warren were legitimate supernatural investigators or frauds or somewhere in-between. Instead, let’s take a look at the movie itself which will, of course, work off the assumption at least that the fictional Warrens were the real thing.
Though the movie does play a bit over how legitimate this particular case is does play a part in the narrative.
After an opening where we see Ed and Lorraine investigating the Amityville house, during which psychic Lorraine had a vision involving a demonic-looking nun, the movie has the Warrens defending themselves on a talk show. From there, the movie shifts over to England where a single mother with multiple children has a problem with her house perhaps being haunted, particularly when her one young daughter seems to be possessed by a former owner of the house. It isn’t long before the Warrens come by to investigate on behalf of the Catholic Church as they often do, working with some local paranormal investigators and generally being decent people who understand what’s going on and are willing to listen to both the child and her mother to get to the bottom of things.
What does the nun have to do with the English ghost? It’s unclear, but there is a connection. That may be besides the point. The main focus of the movie isn’t on the nun so much as is it on Lorraine and Ed and how they work so well together. If the first movie had a lot of Ed, the “normal” guy who knows a lot about Church doctrine and the like, worrying over psychic Lorraine, then this movie does the opposite as Lorraine’s vision suggest a coming doom for her husband. That said, the movie does hinge on how the two of them are a mutually supportive team that have each other’s backs. Each one has a moment of telling their story to the scared little girl that both ends more or less the same way about how they felt when they finally met the one person to believe them, and since Lorraine told the story first, the girl predicted the ending when Ed told his side, where Ed simply smiled and guessed the girl had heard the story already. It helps that Patrick Wilson and Vera Farminga are both strong actors with some good chemistry.
It also helps that director James Wan generally knows what he’s doing with creepy images of ghosts being just out of focus and other small, solid moments, though none quite reach the same level as the first movie’s creepiest scenes. Regardless, the movie does have a third act twist where it comes out that the girl may be faking it. That seems unlikely given everything the audience has seen, but it is enough for many of the involved investigators (but not the Warrens) to pack up and leave. This is a somewhat famous case of supposed real-world haunted house phenomena, and the movie actually takes time to acknowledge how much of what happens looks like a trick as opposed to, say, actual supernatural activity. However, this is a movie retelling, so regardless of what anyone making these movies believes about the real case, in the movie’s universe, this is real, so I can and will treat it as such.
All that means that this was a mostly satisfying sequel. It’s not as good as the first, due largely to the lack of scares on par with the original movie, but it does have a fairly good pace for a movie like this, and the character work for the Warrens is fairly good. It is somewhat hard to believe that the various Conjuring movies, including the spin-offs with Annabelle the doll and the demon Nun from this movie, are perhaps the second strongest cinematic universe going after the MCU, but its true. And while I have no desire to check out the other movies within this universe, I can still say this one was fairly good in its own right.
Grade: B-
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