THE CONJURING: THE DEVIL MADE ME DO IT (2021)

Studio:      New Line Cinema
Director:    Michael Chaves
Writer:      David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick
Producer:  Peter Safran, James Wan
Stars:     Patrick Wilson, Vera Farmiga, Ruairi O’Connor, Sarah Catherine Hook, Julian Hilliard, Sterling Jerins, Ronnie Gene Blevins, Shannon Kook, John Noble

Review Score:

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Summary:

Ed and Lorraine Warren hunt down a deadly occultist while trying to prove a man’s murder was the result of demonic possession.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Surrounded by a storm of paranormal activity, Ed and Lorraine Warren participate in Father Gordon’s exorcism of eight-year-old David Glatzel. Ed collapses from a heart attack during the ordeal. Hoping to save the boy, Arne Cheyenne Johnson, who is the boyfriend of David’s older sister Debbie, pleads for the demon to possess him instead. The evil entity enters Arne, although everyone present presumes the demon merely vanished.

Arne starts suffering from demonic visions. When he recovers in the hospital, Ed immediately warns that the demon transferred to Arne at the end of David’s exorcism. Ed and Lorraine are too late to stop Arne from killing Debbie’s boss Bruno while in a state of possession. Arne is arrested and imprisoned.

Ed and Lorraine propose entering a “not guilty by reason of demonic possession” plea to Arne’s attorney Meryl. After quelling Meryl’s skepticism, Ed and Lorraine realize they will have to prove Arne was possessed despite the demon no longer being inside him.

Ed and Lorraine begin by investigating the bedroom where David first encountered the demon inside a waterbed five months earlier. In a crawlspace beneath the floor, Lorraine finds a witch’s totem constructed from small animal bones and concludes a Satanist summoned a demon to curse David. The demon transferred to Arne, but departed once Arne took a life.

Father Gordon refers Ed and Lorraine to former priest Kastner, who was devoted to combating satanic cults. Upon seeing a picture of the totem, Kastner warns that Ed and Lorraine are dealing with a sophisticated occultist.

Ed and Lorraine’s assistant Drew refers them to Sergeant Clay, a homicide detective in Danvers, Massachusetts working a case involving an identical totem. Clay tells Ed and Lorraine about Katie Lincoln and Jessica Strong, who went missing four months earlier. Katie was found stabbed to death. Jessica disappeared, although police recovered a totem from her home.

Ed and Lorraine ask to see the case file. Unconvinced that the Warrens are genuine or that Arne Johnson was possessed, Clay first has Lorraine prove her psychic sensitivity by identifying the knife that killed Katie. After Lorraine does, Clay takes the couple to the forest where Katie’s body was found.

Demonic visions continue plaguing Arne in prison. Debbie and David visit Arne and discover the demon still haunts his head.

In the woods, a flashback vision shows Lorraine that Jessica repeatedly stabbed her friend Katie while possessed. Lorraine instinctively runs like Jessica then did. Lorraine ends up at a cliff’s edge where the demon tries pulling her off. Ed rescues Lorraine. Lorraine reveals Jessica jumped off the cliff after killing Katie. Clay and the police find Jessica’s corpse in the water below. Clay agrees to show Ed and Lorraine the case file.

Debbie calls Ed and Lorraine to tell them the demon still haunts Arne. Ed advises Debbie to have prison chaplain Father Newman put Arne on suicide watch.

Lorraine concludes the curse can be broken since the demon was not summoned of its own free will. Feeling connected to the entity from having touched David during the exorcism, Lorraine and Ed break into a funeral home to see if Lorraine can also make a psychic connection through Jessica’s corpse. Holding Jessica’s hand shows Lorraine a vision of a female occultist conducting a ritual over an underground altar. At the same time, Arne is compelled to cut his wrists with broken glass in prison. Lorraine’s psychic sensitivity interrupts the occultist, who confronts Lorraine in the vision. Arne survives. A reanimated corpse attacks Ed until he manages to separate Lorraine’s and Jessica’s hands. Lorraine’s vision ends.

Ed and Lorraine bring Jessica’s case file to Drew and Debbie. Drew shows Ed and Lorraine an ancient book written in Latin that depicts the totem and speaks of human sacrifice. A passage indicates such a curse can be broken by destroying the altar where the ritual was conducted.

Ed collapses. Ed experiences a nightmarish vision where he confronts the occultist as well as the corpse that attacked him in the funeral home. Drew shakes Ed from his hallucination before it fully tricks Ed into attacking Lorraine. Ed subsequently discovers someone sneaked a totem into his house by hiding it in a vase of sympathy flowers.

While Ed and Drew continue reviewing files, Debbie goes to the prison to be with Arne. Desperate to deduce the altar’s location and identify the occultist, Lorraine brings the Latin book to Kastner for translation.

Kastner tells Lorraine that completing the curse requires three victims: a child, a lover, and a man of God. Kastner also reluctantly reveals that he secretly raised a daughter, Isla, without the church’s knowledge. Kastner confirms his satanic research fascinated Isla and she ultimately became the occultist Lorraine is trying to find.

Ed and Drew link David’s case to Jessica’s and determine they are dealing with a local woman. From descriptive clues Lorraine provided from her visions, Ed and Drew narrow down the altar’s location to train tracks by a river. Ed realizes the location is near Kastner’s farm. Recognizing his wife is in danger, Ed rushes to Kastner’s.

Kastner sends Lorraine into underground tunnels beneath his property to search for his daughter’s altar. Meanwhile, Isla comes to the farm and slits her father’s throat.

Lorraine finds the altar. When Ed arrives, Isla casts a spell that causes Ed to become possessed. Ed chases Lorraine with a sledgehammer. At the same time, paranormal activity surrounds Arne at the prison as Isla tries to complete her ritual. Lorraine snaps Ed out of his demonic trance by appealing to their love for one another. Ed uses the sledgehammer to destroy the altar. Arne returns to normal.

Isla tries to confront Ed and Lorraine. With the curse broken however, the demon causes Isla to contort to death so he can take her soul back to Hell. Arne goes on to be convicted of murder, although he marries Debbie while in prison.

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Review:

For a few moments, I couldn’t believe my eyes. There I was on social media, staring at scathing takes that called “The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It” a disappointment, a huge letdown, and the worst film in the series. The comments themselves weren’t unusual. It was who they were coming from.

The voices volleying complaints weren’t just the same TruHorror “fans” who predictably hate something simply because it’s popular. These negative notions also came from known horror cheerleaders: the people that other people often accuse of being shills, not because they proudly post pictures of swag boxes sent by studios, but because they like almost everything and nearly never have a bad word to say about anything. If these massive fans of the franchise who’ve praised all previous entries disliked “The Devil Made Me Do It” enough to *gasp* say so online, I figured the movie might really be a mess.

On the other hand, such sentiments seemed widespread, yet far from unanimous. While an editor for a genre website separately wrote about the movie going by the book before leaving him underwhelmed, his site’s in-house critic awarded “The Devil Made Me Do It” four stars, lauding it as a thrilling chapter that breathes new life into The Conjuring Universe.

Divisive horror films typically tend to be festival darlings that appeal to academics. I didn’t expect a mainstream movie like a “Conjuring” sequel to elicit wildly disparate reactions normally reserved for arthouse atmosphere pieces.

When an objective opinion dodges these love/hate hive-minds at both ends, where does that really leave “The Devil Made Me Do It?” As is usually the case in heavily-hyperbolized circumstances, the truth lies somewhere in between.

The reality is that it’s practically impossible for a film in The Conjuring Universe to truly be awful. Too much money and too many parties are deeply invested to ever treat the property like Dimension treated its “Hellraiser” and “Children of the Corn” licenses. Even if/when a “Conjuring” movie goes through the motions, those motions are going to be smooth, sharp-looking, and delivered by experienced professionals who can create a formulaic fright flick in their sleep. By that same token, it’s still highly possible for a “Conjuring” movie to turn out mediocre, and that’s pretty much what happens with “The Devil Made Me Do It.”

Even though he’s taking the helm of the franchise’s flagship, it’s unfair to saddle Michael Chaves with the exact expectations applied to one-of-a-kind horror master James Wan. They’ve both made movies in The Conjuring Universe, but they are different directors. Understandably, “The Devil Made Me Do It” suffers from a “this isn’t James Wan” influenza. Also understandably, that downgrade puts off some viewers right away. “The Devil Made Me Do It” retains some of the style from the first two films.

While there isn’t anything as memorable as “The Conjuring’s” clapping or “The Conjuring 2’s” possessed painting, “The Conjuring 3” comes up with a couple of cool setups like a violent waterbed demon and a creepy visual where monster fingers mix with curtain rings on a shower rod. Scares slide further down the scale from there. Cheaper pops come from clichés like rats suddenly darting by (more than once) and the usual tiptoeing around in dark rooms to set macabre moods.

Although routine frights are tolerable, it’s tougher to take “The Devil Made Me Do It’s” pace. In switching from haunted house yarns to a post-possession tale, the movie gets stuck in the slowness of a procedural investigation padded with yawn-worthy exposition. Ed and Lorraine Warren embark on a connect-the-dots trail that features the humdrum buildup of reviewing files, translating old books, and traveling from one person to another until clues come together for a demonic faceoff. Along the way, scenes get sidetracked with shots of a man repeatedly shivering in his prison cell and other extraneous events delaying the inevitable. That said, Ed and Lorraine also encounter a requisite amount of personal danger and earn plenty of time to twinkle their eyes at each other, evening out “The Devil Made Me Do It” as a quietly average thriller.

A larger part of “The Conjuring’s” perception problem probably has to do with overall franchise fatigue. Spinoffs have increased the variety of directions taken, although they all boil down to somewhat similar supernatural adventures.

Refreshing The Conjuring Universe might require a reckoning regarding the real life Ed and Lorraine Warren. Fans aren’t fully fed up with their fictionalized counterparts. Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga are two actors of whom no one has ever said, “I can’t stand them.” Wilson and Farmiga are well-liked and highly personable performers. The ongoing love story between their incarnations of Ed and Lorraine has emotionally anchored each appearance with a touching arc of cinematic romance. So much so that some may tire of being hit over the head with their saccharin sweet relationship, another indicator that the signature beats of the series could use an update.

The real Ed and Lorraine Warren weren’t as universally beloved. Quite the contrary. And the inherent issue with consistently depicting The Warrens as righteous religious heroes while using their “true story” cases to do so ironically outs them as bunco artists.

Based on an actual crime, the entire plot of “The Devil Made Me Do It” revolves around Ed and Lorraine trying to prove that Arne Johnson was possessed by a demon when he murdered a man, who was his landlord in reality but is his girlfriend’s boss in this adaptation. Proving Arne’s “innocence” requires Ed and Lorraine to experience a harrowing curse of their own as they hunt down a deadly occultist and face fears in the form of flashbacks, nightmares, and hellish hallucinations. Ed and Lorraine survive each trial and tribulation which, in a completely made-up movie, should result in Arne’s exoneration while Ed and Lorraine are seen as saviors. Except that’s not what happened. After Ed and Lorraine save Arne’s life, dispatch the demon, and have a reunion inside the gazebo from their first date, “The Devil Made Me Do It” concludes on laughably lackluster epilogue text that brings the fantasy back down to earth with, “Arne Johnson was convicted on the charge of manslaughter.” Haha, no sh*t!

At this point, The Powers That Be would be better off scrapping “ripped from old headlines” nonsense and coming up with totally imaginary tales for movie Ed and Lorraine instead. Not only might we get stories that are more intriguing since they aren’t shackled to inconvenient facts, but then the films wouldn’t inadvertently prove The Warrens never had a quantifiable impact since they never conjured substantiated scientific evidence of paranormal activity. “Oh, so in reality a judge rolled his eyes and threw out Arne Johnson’s ‘not guilty by reason of demonic possession’ defense as a poppycock plea? You don’t say!”

Review Score: 55

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