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C+Intrepid ghostbusters Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) return in director James Wan‘s The Conjuring 2, but unlike their first onscreen appearance in the 2013 original, the Warrens run up against one ghost they simply can’t bust. I’m not talking about any of the spirits and demons in the movie; instead, I’m referring to the real life incident that inspired Conjuring 2 and whose presence needlessly weighs the film down.  

The movie is based on the so-called Enfield Poltergeist, a spirit that supposedly haunted a house in a London suburb in the late 1970’s. In Conjuring 2, 11-year-old Janet Hodgson (Madison Wolfe) is possessed by what appears to be the spirit of the elderly man who previously owned the house. The local church asks the Warrens to investigate, and they eventually determine that an extremely powerful demon that had appeared previously in Lorraine’s visions has now taken up residence in the home.

Director Wan is one of the most skilled of the new generation of horror directors and brings his talents to bear here. Instead of jump scares, he relies on slowly building tension, with the audience anticipating bad things or glimpsing them in the background before the characters become aware of them. The Conjuring 2 also benefits from a terrific cast, including Wilson and Farmiga, who are quite folksy and have good chemistry with each other. The Hodgson family is depicted at some length as well and become real characters instead of mere hapless victims, with Frances O’Connor quite effective as the increasingly harried single mother who faces economic and emotional as well as paranormal problems. Finally, the Warrens receive help from rival investigators Franka Potente and Simon McBurney as, respectively, skeptic and true believer. Their rival viewpoints are a useful narrative device to help explain some of the events in the movie. Still, Conjuring 2 has one major weakness; Wan made the film with Lorraine Warren’s assistance and wound up accepting the Warrens’ version of events, even though they have essentially been debunked. As a result, the movie runs nearly a half hour too long and includes a series of manifestations and bizarre occurrences that individually are creepy but eventually grow repetitive. The Conjuring 2 becomes a clear example of the principle that less is more. Still, more of Conjuring 2 is better than lots of lesser horror films out there.    

In this scene, a possessed Madison Wolfe talks on camera. Our full review of The Conjuring 2 will be posted on Silver Screen Cinema as soon as it is available.

 

Photo credit: “Neil_Grabowsky-Converstion_Patrick_Wilson-TTL_8729”  by Neil Grabowsky / Montclair Film Festival  / Flickr / CC BY 2.0

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