The thrill of watching an Annabelle movie is seeing the haunted doll herself (itself?) and trying your best to spot whether it moves of its own volition (only under very special circumstances). While a movie which doesn’t show you much of the Annabelle doll would certainly be less frightening, it also loses the charm of an Annabelle movie in the first place. Annabelle Comes Home manages to make up for it with a bevy of second-tier monsters and being entertaining when it’s not trying to scare you.
Annabelle Comes Home takes place after the events of Annabelle. The home refers to the dwelling of Ed and Lorraine Warren, who have taken the doll home for safekeeping. However, their daughter’s babysitter’s foolish friend ends up unleashing Annabelle’s evil across the entire house – which means that the Warrens may never see their daughter alive again.
The movie’s stakes are the lives of the Warrens’ daughter, Judy Warren (McKenna Grace), as well as her baby sitter Mary Ellen (Madison Iseman) and her dumb friend Daniela Rios (Katie Sarife). You might think that “dumb friend” is a slightly harsh way to describe an innocent young teenager, but it couldn’t be more apt. Daniela is the sole cause of the movie’s problems, brought about by her immense self-centredness and sheer stupidity. She remains one of the movie’s lowest points from start to finish, irritating you to no end with catastrophically inane actions and a “me me me” attitude.
The film does make an effort to redeem her by giving her some semblance of a backstory, but it only serves to make her appear even more grating than the actual antagonist of the film. While it’s true that she’s perhaps the most colourful and interesting of the film’s characters, she’s also the one that you can’t help but want to throw a shoe at, when you’re not wincing from the slow zoom-ins of some haunted artifact.
Fortunately, the movie is entertaining in its own right – more than it is scary. The relationships between the protagonists, while not the most stellar of stories, is a bit more well-developed and feels more like a teen drama than the regular scary movie. However, this does come at the expense of the film’s frights. This neutering of the frights appears to be an intentional choice, perhaps to appeal to a wider audience. You can see the scares coming from a mile away, even though it doesn’t make it any less terrifying. Rather, it builds upon the tension created by all that anticipation to create frights that feel earned, rather than relying on cheap jump scares.
Annabelle Comes Home also relies on creating an atmosphere of eeriness to keep audiences on the edge of their seats. The lingering shots, the creatures which flit just out of the corner of your eye, and the overall atmosphere of danger create a horror movie which might not necessarily have you screaming, but will definitely have you cringing at every reveal and situation.
In some ways, the film also feels like a crossover of The Conjuring monsters that never was, with a large variety of supernatural terrors that have come into being thanks to Annabelle herself. These ghosts feel like aborted ideas for other films in The Conjuring film universe, by being scary but one-note. Annabelle Comes Home also does innovate with some creative solutions for combating the villains, but some ideas are less than stellar.
Unfortunately, in showing all these possible ideas for future films, it neglects its star — Annabelle the doll. You hardly see Annabelle, although you do hear her name being shrieked every now and then. It doesn’t give as much as many shots of Annabelle as previous Annabelle films did, perhaps because audiences have grown wise to that that technique. Nevertheless, it did feel like it was missing something critical for a film titled Annabelle Comes Home, namely, Annabelle.
Annabelle Comes Home might not have the bite of its predecessors, but it does entertain as a horror movie. By using a different mix of horror devices, it manages to provide the thrill of watching a horror film, without being traumatically terrifying. For a light-hearted horror movie (if such a thing could be said to exist), Annabelle Comes Home fits perfectly.
Should you watch this at weekday movie ticket prices? Yes.
Should you watch this at weekend movie ticket prices? If you like the Annabelle movies.
Score: 3.4/5
Secret ending? No.
Running time: 106 minutes (~1.75 hours)
Annabelle Comes Home is a horror movie that is the third in the Annabelle film series, and the seventh instalment in The Conjuring film franchise.
The film follows the haunted doll Annabelle as she’s taken to the home of a pair of paranormal investigators to be imprisoned. Unfortunately, her presence awakens the evil spirits that have also been imprisoned in the house, thanks to the spectacularly stupid actions of one nosey girl.
Annabelle Comes Home is directed and written by Gary Dauberman, with story credits for James Wan. It stars McKenna Grace (Judy Warren), Madison Iseman (Mary Ellen), Katie Sarife (Daniela Rios), Patrick Wilson (Ed Warren), Vera Farmiga (Lorraine Warren), and Michael Cimino (Bob Palmeri). It is rated PG-13.
Annabelle Comes Home opens in cinemas:
– 26 June, 2019 (Singapore)
– 27 June, 2019 (Philippines)
Read these other reviews of movies in The Conjuring film franchise
- [Movie Review] ‘Annabelle: Creation’ has so much tension that you can’t breathe
- [Movie Review] “Annabelle” keeps you on the edge of your seat
- [Movie Review] ‘The Curse of the Weeping Woman’ is delightfully horrific in all the right ways
- [Movie Review] ‘The Conjuring 2’ will give you nightmares
This article was written for and first published on Yahoo Singapore.
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I’m an independent scriptwriter who’s written for popular shows like Lion Mums, Crimewatch, Police & Thief, and Incredible Tales. I’m also a Transformers enthusiast and avid pop culture scholar. You can find me on social media as Optimarcus and on my site.
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