When there’s something strange, in your neighborhood, who you gonna call? Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga! Ok, their catchphrase isn’t very good, but they try hard.
In my review of this year’s abysmal The Forest, I suggested that modern horror techniques essentially amount to a cache of stock jump scares. Nothing in The Conjuring 2 has made me re-assess that stance entirely, although it has challenged my unstated assumption that you can’t make a very good movie with those tools. Our story begins with the Warrens, Ed and Lorraine, conducting an investigation on the Amityville murders in the 70’s. Spooky stuff happens, and then we bounce to England where a single-mother family is experiencing their own spookiness in the form of a ghost haunting their run-down house. The ghost seems to be pissed off simply for being dead, and targets young Janet for the majority of his haunting activity. For the rest of the disjointed first act, things proceed as expected, providing us some standard haunted house business interspersed with scenes where we learn about the Warrens and the creepy apparition that has begun stalking them.
Director James Wan, most famous for the early entries into the Saw franchise, definitely brings some stylistic pizazz to bear on his jump scare arsenal. He whips the camera around wildly at times, coming to rest in positions that clearly hide some horror just off screen, almost taunting us with his framing. It’s eye-rollingly obvious where the scares are going to come from, but I found myself frustratingly roped in regardless, because Wan excels at using our anticipation to his advantage. While he does employ his tactics with great success, these remain the cheapest of scares. It’s scary because your fight-or-flight response is goosed, not because the situation is intellectually frightening, or because you are empathizing with the characters in peril. For a while, I thought that was all that was on offer: Cheap thrills in an unimaginative wrapper. Luckily, the film had a few tricks up its sleeve.
When the two disparate plot threads finally come together, things start to look up. The interaction of the Warrens, a husband and wife pair that is at the same time warm, brave and pragmatic, with the Hodgsons, the exasperated victims of the unhappy spirit, provide both sets of characters with a lot of humanity. We jump forward in time quite a bit and short circuit the ponderous process of things getting incrementally scarier in scene after scene. Instead, we find out almost off hand that Janet has been levitating, or discover that her mother has been nailing up crosses all over her room without having to sit through the three-minute scene where it actually happens. The shorthand affords the film time to explore some interesting territory, including what happens when such a story becomes public and how hard it is for people to actually accept things that are supernatural, despite all but the most concrete of evidence.
By the time the Warrens unravel the mystery (remember that all ghost stories are mysteries), the stakes have been effectively raised and everything comes together for a pulse-pounding finish. When it comes to scares, Wan never does really add to his bag of tricks, but the same shock tactics that grated in the first act are injected with far more power once we are invested in this story and its outcome for our protagonists. I can’t say that The Conjuring 2 is a must-see classic, but I did end up enjoying it. Enough so that you may find a review of the first Conjuring film coming your way during an upcoming Halloween season. Don’t hold your breath on that killer doll movie, though.
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