Parents' Guide to The Conjuring: Last Rites

The ninth movie in the successful Conjuring Universe horror franchise, this entry takes an unreasonably long time to get set up and then rushes through the finale as if none of it mattered. Ed and Lorraine are great characters; they have strong chemistry, and their lore—loosely based on real cases—is fascinating. Farmiga and Wilson are a fine team and make the couple work so well that it's tempting to give The Conjuring: Last Rites (the fourth film with "Conjuring" in the title, but the ninth in the series if you also include the Annabelle and Nun movies) a pass because of them. But the movie seems to want to provide an emotional, epic ending for the franchise, and instead it feels more like a last gasp inspired by profit vs. storytelling. It tries to build characters and establish relationships, but it still takes more than 90 minutes before the Warrens even set foot in the haunted house.

Director Michael Chaves is responsible for several of the weaker films in the Conjuring Universe, unfortunately revealing a tendency to combine effective, simple chills with silly, overly familiar frights and jump scares. (Frankly, it feels insulting that an expert like Lorraine would fall for a couple of the less impressive ones.) And while it promises that this particular case concerns an evil unlike anything the Warrens have ever faced before, the showdown here is ultimately disappointingly underwhelming. It's too bad that the series couldn't have ended on a high note, but The Conjuring: Last Rites is at least, hopefully, actually an ending.