Any positive expectations one might had have for director James Wan’s latest feature, The Conjuring, stem predominantly from his previous work, Insidious. The latter is an unexpectedly effective jolt of old-fashioned horror filmmaking that stylishly blends a host of genre influences. Unfortunately, The Conjuring, while it has similar ambitions, is a sorry mess of a film. Sloppily written and leadenly derivative, Wan’s latest even lacks the fundamental redemptive quality of a good bad horror flick: scariness.
Billed as Based on a True Story, the film pits paranormal investigators Lorraine and Ed Warren (Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson) against a malevolent entity dwelling in the rural Rhode Island home of the Perrons (Ron Livingston and Lili Taylor). Wan and screenwriters Carey and Chad Hayes crib shamelessly from every halfway noteworthy entry in the haunted house and exorcism movie subgenres. This might have been excusable, had all the cut-and-paste had been performed with a modicum of dark flair. Excepting a couple of atmospheric sequences, however, The Conjuring just feels inert and musty.
The film’s most fundamental flaw is its script, which manages to be simultaneously wooly, convoluted, and uninteresting. The story problems are immediately apparent in the pointless prelude. This intro establishes a clunky set of supernatural rules that are swiftly discarded, while also setting up a superfluous B-plot about the Warrens’ daughter. While it fulfills the essential task of slowly cranking up the supernatural craziness, the film goes about this task in such a stale and wobbly manner that it never truly engages. The Conjuring might have been merely forgettable, but the screenplay’s penchant for dunderheaded theistic apologetics makes it borderline obnoxious.
