This film might be the 3rd Conjuring film but it's in fact the 8th film in the Conjuring universe. What started off in a relatively sedate and grounded manner in 2013 has turned into one of the biggest earning franchises of the 21st century. As with all film series comes the demand for bigger thrills and spills and each successive film has without a doubt delivered on that front but as always building spectacle takes away from the human side of the story and that's where the best parts of The Conjuring have always lain.
1981. Brookfield, Connecticut. We come upon the start of a demonic exorcism. A young boy's body contorts and snaps out of shape as the demon within tries to resist the words of the priest before him. His family stand around terrified and renowned demonologists Ed (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine Warren (Vera Farmiga) try and fail to keep them calm. Family friend Arne Johnson (Ruairi O'Connor) can't bear it anymore, it's too hard to watch this child suffering so he pleads with the demon to take him instead. Months later, when the dust has settled, Arne snaps and so begins one of the most infamous murder trials ever to take place on American soil.
About 30 minutes into The Conjuring 3 Lorraine Warren is investigating a house and crawls into the rodent and arachnid infested crawlspace below it. It's a horribly tense and claustrophobic moment as you watch her shuffle through the darkness, all the time waiting for something to emerge shrieking from the shadows and attack her. Nothing happens to her down there but it's still the scariest part of the film and that says an awful lot about the direction the series has taken. 8 years ago it was all about shadows and creaks and glimpsing something out of the corner of your eye, letting the story build, letting us get to know the characters and the world they inhabited before all hell broke loose. This time you're thrown into it from the very start. Bloody showers, knifey kids, demonic growls, bones splintering, melodrama overload and director Michael Chaves even cheekily throws in a shot of a priest arriving that flat out evokes that famous shot from The Exorcist . Hitting such a fever pitch this early in the film means it never really recovers from it.
Then it all changes tact, splitting it's story in two, one part supernatural and the other detective, giving us a flabby midsection that splits the cast apart for too long and that robs us of the best thing about these films, the relationship between Lorraine and Ed. How they feel like a real, genuine, loving couple, the way they work together and compliment each other. The chemistry between Fermiga and Wilson burned bright in the first film and has only deepened since and why the writers felt the need to keep them away from each other here is baffling. With them together the madness we see is far easier to swallow. And things get pretty wild alright but none of it is any bit scary, especially if you know the real life story of the Warrens which robs the scenes of them in peril of all their tension. It's reached the stage where it feels very formulaic, like a funfair ride where things get kinda hairy but you know everything will be grand in a couple of minutes.
The root cause of the problem here is satanic and it does add a new spin into a franchise built up til now on ghosts n'ghouls. We get all manner of spooky imagery and grotesque backstory but it lends a silliness to proceedings that will make your eyes roll. Yup, silliness in a series about ghosts, it's hard to fathom right but try as director Chaves might to scare us with it all you'll end up smirking more than screaming. There's nothing here on a par with the Old Bill sequence from The Conjuring 2 and as hard as Ruairi O'Connor (from Howth btw) works to make us elicit sympathy for him, you'll just never care for him as you did for the Perrons or the Hodgsons from the earlier films. It's what happens with the human aspect of the story comes second to spectacle.
The Conjuring 3 : The Devil Made Me Do It is in cinemas now. It's effective in places but it's most definitely the lesser of the 3 main films so far.
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