Film Review: Annabelle Comes Home – Director, Gary Dauberman

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Annabelle Comes Home is the sequel to 2014’s Annabelle and 2017’s Annabelle: Creation, and the seventh installment in the Conjuring Universe franchise. Oxford Lamoureaux reviews this latest outing.The Conjuring Universe wraps its narrative around real-life demonology and witchcraft consultants, Ed and Lorraine Warren. The Warrens’ supernatural history is almost perfectly manufactured for horror cinema, inspiring The Amityville Horror, The Haunting in Connecticut, and now The Conjuring and its many sequels.

Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga reprise their roles as Ed and Lorraine Warren, with both actors delivering excellent performances as they have since the first Conjuring film. Farmiga has always been brilliant in her portrayal of Lorraine Warren – who passed away in April of this year, with this film dedicated to her memory – and again brings the balance of calm restraint and perpetual dread that made her original performance so perfect.

Annabelle Comes Home is the third installment in the Annabelle series, and viewers unfamiliar with The Conjuring series, the Warrens, or Annabelle are given a familiar mini prologue providing all the necessary information: demonologists, a terrifying doll, a room full of horrors, three curious and resourceful young characters, and one night alone. Perfect, right?

The film centres around the Warrens’ ten-year-old daughter Judy (Mckenna Grace), her babysitter Mary Ellen (Madison Iseman) and Mary Ellen’s friend, Daniela (Katie Sarife) as they accidentally unleash an entire collection of demonic horrors while the Warrens are out of town.

Annabelle Comes Home is set in 1971, and isn’t afraid to tug on the nostalgia strings of a simpler time when kids were carefree and weren’t afraid of exploring demon-infested rooms. Thankfully, the film provides the super cool and surprisingly macabre Daniela, who makes a collection of remarkably bad decisions which set up the remainder of the film for guaranteed jump scares.

Mckenna Grace brings her best combination of Beetlejuice’s Winona Ryder and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina’s Kiernan Shipka to the role of Judy Warren, and carries much of the film’s spookiness with a genuine charm and relatability.

As another number in the Conjuring franchise, Annabelle Comes Home doesn’t bring anything remarkable to the universe as a whole, while as a stand-alone film it serves as a genuinely enjoyable snapshot of the Warrens’ history without taking itself too seriously. This is arguably the film’s greatest strength, bringing the same flavour as The Cabin in The Woods with its varied compilation-style collection of monsters and demons, and nailing every possible horror trope, camera shot, jump-scare moment you can imagine.

As a retro-adventure comedy horror, Annabelle Comes Home isn’t wildly ambitious or guilty of overstaying its welcome, and despite some initially lukewarm performances and a slow-burning first act, it’s a film that is almost guaranteed to deliver a handful of chilling moments. However, it’s also a film that embraces the chance to be fun, with some cheesily 70s cameo characters and recurring jokes that just manage to remain fresh throughout.

Those looking for a classical Poltergeist story will perhaps be disappointed, while if your idea of a popcorn horror is Thir13en Ghosts and The Cabin In The Woods blended with the teen escapades of Disturbia, Annabelle Comes Home is a delightfully horrifying surprise.

~Oxford Lamoureaux

Oxford Lamoureaux
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