ANNABELLE (2014)

Studio:       Warner Bros. Pictures
Director:    John R. Leonetti
Writer:       Gary Dauberman
Producer:  Peter Safran, James Wan
Stars:     Annabelle Wallis, Ward Horton, Alfre Woodard, Tony Amendola, Eric Ladin

Review Score:

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Summary:

A vintage children’s doll becomes a conduit for evil after a young couple is terrorized by a satanic cult.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Santa Monica, CA – John Form gifts his pregnant wife Mia with a vintage doll for her collection. That night, John and Mia’s next-door neighbors Pete and Sharon are murdered in their home by their estranged daughter Annabelle Higgins and her boyfriend, the leader of a satanic cult with whom Annabelle had run away.

Mia hears Sharon’s scream, prompting John to investigate while Mia phones an ambulance. Annabelle and her boyfriend then break into John and Mia’s home. The cult leader stabs Mia in her stomach. John returns to the house and tries unsuccessfully to fight the man. Before the madman can stab Mia again, police arrive and take him down with gunfire. Annabelle locks herself in the room with Mia’s doll collection and slits her own throat. She dies while cradling Mia’s doll and bleeding into its eyes.

Mia and her unborn baby survive the attack, but Dr. Burgher advises Mia to finish out her pregnancy with bed rest at home. Instances of seeming paranormal activity prompt Mia to ask for the doll’s removal from the house. John puts Annabelle in the trashcan outside.

John leaves Mia alone to attend a one-day work conference. A fire breaks out in the kitchen under mysterious circumstances. Mia is taken to the hospital following the incident and ends up giving birth to a daughter that the couple names Leah. Mia tells John that she believes their house is cursed and no longer wants to live there. John agrees.

Pasadena, CA – Mia and John move into the Palmeri Apartments. The doll strangely reappears in one of the moving boxes, but Mia decides to keep it in her collection.

Mia makes friends with Evelyn, the proprietor of Old Towne Books. On her way home from the shop, Mia finds a series of children’s drawings on her building’s staircase depicting a truck hitting Leah’s baby carriage in a grisly scene.

Paranormal activity begins in the new home. Mia sees a ghostly vision of Annabelle Higgins. She and John seek counsel from their parish priest Father Perez. During a frightful supernatural encounter in the apartment building’s basement, a mark appears on Mia’s arm that resembles the bloody symbol Annabelle drew on the nursery room wall before her death.

Realizing that Annabelle Higgins is linked to the haunting, Mia asks Detective Clarkin, the lead investigator on the Higgins murders, about Annabelle’s cult. Mia learns that the cult was known as “The Disciples of the Ram” and they were seemingly involved in a ritual intended to conjure a demon.

Mia returns to the bookstore and ends up telling Evelyn about the haunting. Evelyn confides in Mia about the tragic death of her own daughter Ruby. Outside the apartment on Mia’s return home, Leah’s baby carriage is struck by a truck as foretold by the drawings, although Leah is not in the carriage at the time.

Mia reads the book “The Devil’s Welcome” and recognizes the bloody symbol as a mark of invocation. Mia comes to believe that the cult’s intention is to spill the blood of an innocent, which she interprets to mean danger for Leah. More paranormal activity continues that puts Leah in apparent jeopardy.

Father Perez agrees to take the doll for safekeeping, but ends up attacked by an invisible force before he can bring it inside the church. In the hospital, Father Perez explains to John that the demon is not actually after Leah. It needs someone to offer his/her soul willingly, and is thus threatening the baby so that Mia will offer herself in exchange for sparing Leah.

The demon attacks Mia and Leah again while Evelyn is present in their home. The entity separates the two women as Leah goes missing inside the apartment. The doll reappears in Leah’s crib. An illusion momentarily causes Mia to believe that Leah has died. To make the haunting stop by giving the demon what it wants, Mia clutches the doll and prepares to jump out the window to her death. Evelyn recovers and John arrives just in time to prevent Mia’s plunge. Evelyn willingly sacrifices herself instead as an act of atonement for her own daughter’s death.

Six Months Later – Mia, John, and Leah attend church services with Father Perez. Meanwhile, the Annabelle doll is sold to a new buyer at an antique shop.

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Review:

“Child’s Play” creator Don Mancini can muse to his heart’s content about a Chucky versus Annabelle crossover, but any such showdown would be a lopsided mismatch.  “Annabelle” is most definitely not a killer plaything movie, and the doll is not even its driving force.  Rather, this is what a 1960s satanic thriller looks like when painted with a fresh coat of 21st-century cinematic sensibilities.

Before famed demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren investigated the Perron family haunting in “The Conjuring,” they tackled the case of the cursed Raggedy Ann doll known as Annabelle.  “Annabelle” is not that story, however.  “Annabelle” is actually a prequel to the tale of the Warrens’ involvement with the notorious toy as well as a prequel to “The Conjuring” (review here).

According to the Warrens’ account, the “true story” of the infamous Annabelle doll began in 1970, when a mother purchased a vintage Raggedy Ann as a 28th birthday gift for her nursing student daughter Donna.  Since the doll had a habit of moving on its own and writing mysterious messages, Donna and her roommate Angie sought counsel from a medium to get to the bottom of the presumed paranormal activity.

The ladies came to learn that Raggedy Ann was actually Annabelle Higgins, a seven-year-old girl who supposedly died tragically on the property where Donna and Angie’s apartment now stood.  Or so the supernatural spirit claimed.

After Donna’s friend Lou had more than one near-fatal encounter with the pint-sized terror, the Warrens entered the picture.  Ed and Lorraine determined that the doll itself was not really possessed at all, but rather inhabited by a devious demonic entity looking to take a human host.  Rites of exorcism ensued, as did additional deathly experiences for those entering the devil doll’s sphere of influence.  In the end, Annabelle came to find herself permanently confined within a blessed display case inside the Warrens’ occult museum/home.

The veracity of the above claims remains a matter of debate between skeptics and supporters.  One thing known for certain is that Annabelle’s origin story as told in the movie bearing her name is 100% fictional.  “Annabelle” is a “what if?” tale of how the doll came to harbor a demonic darkness before Donna’s mother made that fateful find in a secondhand antique shop.

It is October of 1970, when the turbulent sixties turned into even more tumultuous times where neighborhood doors no longer remained unlocked and scandalous stories of sex cults and savagery made headline news.  Ideal Middle Americans John and Mia (Ward Horton and Annabelle Wallis, the latter of whom resembles a blonde Tina Fey) are expecting their first child, and John keeps a smile on his wife’s face by gifting Mia with a highly sought-after addition for her vintage doll collection.

Celebration turns to terror when the next-door neighbors are brutally butchered by their estranged daughter Annabelle Higgins and her bearded boyfriend, the hippie leader of a satanic cult.  Hellbent on a demonic summoning, the devilish duo sets sights on John and Mia as their next knife victims.  But the blade finds Annabelle instead, and her blood drips into the doll now clutched by her corpse’s claws.

Life moves on, as do John, Mia, and their newborn daughter Leah.  Annabelle moves with them, too.  From Santa Monica to Pasadena, paranormal activity becomes a persistent plague from which Mia is seemingly unable to escape.  Death ended Annabelle’s life, but it did not diminish her cult’s desire to invoke an evil spirit.  The doll is merely a conduit.  What the demon really wants is to possess a human soul.  Mia or Leah.  And it is determined to take one of them no matter what.

“Annabelle” is as close to a James Wan-styled thriller as a movie not actually helmed by James Wan can realistically get.  Longtime cinematographer and frequent Wan collaborator John R. Leonetti takes his turn in the director’s chair and brings along the same signature style that gave “Dead Silence,” “Insidious,” and “The Conjuring” their distinct looks of colorful creepiness.  James Kniest is the actual director of photography, but Leonetti’s fingerprint presses into every unsettling visual to ensure it fits in a weird Wan-esque world.

Point an accusatory finger towards the movie’s reliance on jarring jolts to frighten, and “Annabelle” is guilty as charged.  But from a three-foot ghost charging the nursery room door to a basement’s black bassinet harboring a sinister stowaway, these jumps are cleverly-crafted scares, not cheap “gotcha” gags of straightforward hand grabs and noisy audio peaks.

Leonetti and Kneist consider camera design carefully, allowing atmosphere to remain alarming when the meat of the story starts losing muscle.  Suspense is built “Final Destination”-style with tightening close-ups on foreshadowed dangers like a fast-stitching sewing machine or stovetop popcorn eager to burst.  The inevitable outcome is purposely telegraphed, yet predictability makes the payoff no less explosive when it finally pops the anticipation.

Watching frights unfold in “Annabelle” is akin to a David Copperfield performance.  There is no true mystery regarding smoke and mirror tricks of how a velvet curtain masks an illusory disappearance.  A seasoned audience knows how the effect is accomplished and has seen it done before, but it is always entertaining to experience when executed with precision craftsmanship.

Long before the protagonist couple moves into their Bramford/Dakota-inspired apartment, “Annabelle” is upfront about its desire to evoke all the best dark qualities of “Rosemary’s Baby” (review here).  (As if the main characters’ names were not an obvious clue.)  Those demonic conspiracy themes then smash into the crazed cult mentality of “Helter Skelter” to give “Annabelle” a unique flavor for contemporary haunted house horror.  Slather on Bob Ziembicki’s sharp production design and Joseph Bishara’s warbled string section strains that made the music stings of “Insidious” and “The Conjuring” so haunting, and “Annabelle” makes up in mood what it misses in context.

The film’s last twenty minutes are as weak as the first twenty minutes are strong.  “Annabelle” admittedly takes a perfectly pitched setup and hits more than one foul ball with a mistimed swing as the plot rolls forward.  Anyone in the cast who is not John or Mia is basically either a plot device or an exposition faucet.  Alfre Woodard in particular doesn’t even play an actual character; she plays a deus ex machina.  And the climax rolls up in a conclusion leaving something to be desired as far as sensible explanations and springboards into the next chapter go.

Yet even when the story is not fully satisfying, the movie’s sense of stylish scares still is.  Anyone anticipating a knife-clutching doll wobbling down hallways and cackling maniacally will be disappointed to discover that Annabelle moves of her own accord on camera just once in the entire film.  For a movie with the appearance of being about a deadly plaything, “Annabelle” is far closer in tone to the sinister stylings of “The Conjuring” than to “Dolls” or “Demonic Toys.”  Plan for eerie visceral chills and evil overtones instead of traditional killer doll trappings, and disappointment will be infinitely harder to come by.

Review Score:  85

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