I've had to promise with this review not to start arguing or pointing out factual inaccuracies in The Conjuring 2, because I happen to know a fair bit about the real-life case that the movie is based on. Known as the Enfield Poltergeist case, this alleged haunting in London in 1977 was also the basis for one of my favourite technically-not-a-movie movies, Ghostwatch, which terrified me and many others back in 1992 (and was also the seed which grew into my fascination with found-footage/mockumentary films and the psychology of how horror films make us scared). So I'll just limit myself to saying that, in reality, the Warrens' involvement in the case was not nearly as much or as dramatic as the movie claims - but hey, when have facts ever gotten in the way of a profitable franchise?
Six years after the events that took place in the first Conjuring movie, Ed and Lorraine Warren have found themselves in the media spotlight. After a series of talk shows where they are called frauds and a seance at the infamous Amityville house where Lorraine sees a sinister nun and an apparent vision of Ed's death, they decide to take a break from paranormal investigation. This 'break' doesn't last very long, however, as they are soon asked to travel to England to observe and consult on a case on behalf of the Catholic Church. A single mother and her four children living in Enfield, London are being terrorised by a malevolent spirit claiming to be an elderly former resident of the house, and the sheer volume and ferocity of the haunting is proving to be too much for anyone else but the Warrens to cope with. So Ed and Lorraine travel to England and soon find there is more to this haunting than first appears...
Okay, I will admit it: the Conjuring movies continue to surprise and impress me. Putting aside the... 'massaging' of the Warrens' appearance and role in these allegedly true stories, this latest film is really quite tense and atmospheric. A lot of this is down to the direction, cinematography and sound, which all do a really excellent job of building up the tension and our expectations to near-breaking point. There are some jump scares, of course, but they're actually in appropriate places rather than just being peppered randomly throughout the film with little to no build-up. Hell, there's one particular jump scare in The Conjuring 2 that's entirely audio-based and very nearly had me ejecting my ice cream sundae all over the seat in front of me when it happened.
As I said above, the cinematography is another excellent source of atmosphere in the movie. There's a couple of instances where what we see in the background is more important than what's going on in the foreground, for example - one instance of this is when Janet, the centre of the haunting, is going slowly upstairs in her dark house at night, and in the background we can just make out the silhouette of an old man sitting in a chair in the front room behind her. There's also another important couple of scenes where background details are particularly important, but for the sake of spoilers I'm not going to go into details there. By far the best use of foreground-background cinematography in my opinion, however, is a scene where the Warrens are "interviewing" the spirit who it is claimed "speaks" through Janet, and while the camera remains focused on Ed the entire time and keeps Janet as a fuzzy-out-of-focus figure, we see that out-of-focus figure seem to slowly morph into that of an old man during the course of the interview - or is it all just an illusion from the lack of focus?
There are one or two flaws in the movie - we get the old Hollywood chestnut of the inverted cross indication demonic activity, when as we all know by now the inverted cross is actually the cross of St. Peter; and one of the movie's recurring demonic motifs, while initially scary, started to become a little overused to me by the end of the film, to the point where I was calling her "Sister Skullface of the Church of the Eternal Waking Nightmare". There were also a couple of scenes in the film that I felt were lifted from elsewhere - one was the ghostly boy that Lorraine sees during the Amityville seance which was an obvious nod to this picture; the other was the tent that the youngest Hodgson child played in, which felt like a reference to The Sixth Sense to me. Overall though, The Conjuring 2 is a very good ghost movie, and I'm even warming to the Warrens as they're played in the movie. And if this franchise is going to continue with a third movie, I'm hoping for the story of the werewolf demon...
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