Movie Review: THE CONJURING 2

The Conjuring benefited from some decent scares, character development and relating the Perron family to the audience while dealing with the Warrens. Add in a pretty terrifying and effective basement exorcism scene and you have a pretty damn successful horror film. I’ll put it this way, it’s in my Blu-Ray collection. Director James Wan definitely showed off his chops by doing a balancing acts within the film with all the characters and creating a genuinely creepy film and that is to be commended. I don’t think that there is any doubt that Wan is int he top-tier of Horror film directors.

One of the benefits of creating a film about Lorraine and Ed Warren who were true-life paranormal investigators is that there was plenty of cases to choose from. Two of their most popular cases end up being in The Conjuring 2 – The Amityville house in Amityville, NY and the Enfield Poltergeist in Enfield, England. The former starts off the film and we spend some time in it but it is really a introduction to a character (whom I’ll reserve to speak of) that ends up connecting the Warrens to the Enfield case. Even though Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) is hesitant on traveling to the North London location due to premonitions and visions she is seeing that puts her family in jeopardy, she is convinced by Ed (Patrick Wilson) that the whole reason that they do this to help families that have nowhere or no one to turn to.

Thanks to the previous entry and Wan’s Furious 7, he has cemented himself in a position where his style and execution is strong enough to probably make a decent film while he is sleeping. He experiments a little with The Conjuring 2 in some of the lighting techniques and composition. Wan’s misdirection makes some of the scares in Conjuring 2 some of the best, if not better than its predecessor. He even injects some gothic lighting into the film (namely the lighting around Farmiga’s eyes in the film’s opening scene) as well as experiments with his ghostly apparitions and a monster/demon called “The Crooked Man”. While the “Crooked Man” scenes are short, they are impactful because it looks, no pun attended, other-worldly and unique from the action taking part in the film. Honestly, it looked like stop motion to me, which I thought was wild. When looking at IMDB to find out who the stop motion was done by, nothing was found. Looking over the cast, it shows Javier Botet (who played the lady in the attic in [REC], among other films) as this character. So, my guess is that Wan and his cinematographer, Don Burgess, undercranked filming this sequence or possibly removed frames to break up the motion. Any way you dice it, it stands out and makes an impact. In addition, the scares or the horror of the film is a bit more intense than the first film. Wan definitely amped it up and it’s pretty effective.

Where The Conjuring 2 fails a bit is with the character development of the family. We spend so much time with the characters yet we don’t feel fully invested into our possessed/troubled character of Janet (Madison Wolfe) or the family involved. It seems like the character focus meanders a bit between our affected family and the Warrens, who feel hokey and forced at times – including a cringe-worthy “Fools Rush In” cover by Ed Warren. We didn’t really need to spend anymore emotional investment with the Warrens, they already had us. We already identify them. Maybe this can be a good thing if you haven’t seen the first one, but I honestly think the audience’s connection to the Warrens is executed better in The Conjuring.

Overall, The Conjuring 2 is pretty solid but it definitely also feels like it wears out its welcome at times as the 2-hour-plus film could of used a bit of a trim.