USA. 2025.
Crew
Director – Michael Chaves, Screenplay – Ian Goldberg, David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick & Richard Naing, Story – David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick & James Wan, Producers – Peter Safran & James Wan, Photography – Eli Born, Music – Benjamin Wallfisch, Visual Effects Supervisor – Scott Edelstein, Visual Effects – Digital Domain (Supervisor – Alexander Millet) & Ingenuity Studio, Special Effects Supervisor – Richard Van Den Bergh, Production Design – John Frankish. Production Company – The Safran Company/Atomic Monster.
Cast
Patrick Wilson (Ed Warren), Vera Farmiga (Lorraine Warren), Mia Tomlinson (Judy Warren), Ben Hardy (Tony Spera), Steve Coulter (Father Gordon), Beau Gadson (Dawn Smurl), Elliot Cowan (Jack Smurl), Rebecca Calder (Janet Smurl), Kila Lord Cassidy (Heather Smurl), Madison Lawlor (Young Lorraine Warren), Orion Smith (Young Ed Warren)
Plot
In 1964, Ed and Lorraine Warren investigate a disturbance at an antique shop. Touching an ornate antique mirror causes the pregnant Lorraine to go into labour. Their daughter Judy is stillborn but makes a recovery. In 1986, the Warrens have retired from actively investigating supernatural phenomena following Ed’s heart-attack. The now grown Judy becomes engaged to former police officer Tony Spera. Meanwhile, in West Pittston, Pennsylvania, the Smurl family are recipients of the mirror. Various of the family experiences manifestations and the daughter Dawn believes there is an evil presence in the house. They contact the press about what is going on, which brings a media frenzy down on the house. The Warrens’ priest Father Gordon investigates. However, as he makes an appointment at the diocese office, an evil force drives Gordon to hang himself. The Warrens visit and find they are facing the same demonic force that sought to claim the infant Judy.
This was the fourth of The Conjuring films. The series started with James Wan’s The Conjuring (2013), followed by his sequel The Conjuring 2 (2016). The series passed over to director Michael Chaves with the third film The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (2021). All of the films make claim to be based on the casebooks of Ed and Lorraine Warrens, the two Connecticut based ghost hunters and demonologists (both now deceased) who investigated a number of purported supernatural manifestations and widely publicised their efforts.
The doll Annabelle that appears in the Warrens house in the first film became of fascination to the public and so James Wan oversaw a film about it with Annabelle (2014). The success of that led to two sequels with Annabelle: Creation (2017) and Annabelle Comes Home (2019). Wan then expanded out into what became referred to as The Conjuring Universe with other connected films such as The Nun (2018), its sequel The Nun II (2023) and The Curse of La Llorona (2019). By this point, any claims to be being based on real life had passed over to the purely fictional.
The Conjuring: Last Rites is based on the Smurl haunting. In 1986, Jack and Janet Smurl of West Pittston, Pennsylvania went public with claims their house was haunted by noises, bad smells, physical phenomena and that they experienced sexual assault by demonic forces. The Warrens investigating proclaiming the house to be inhabited by four spirits and a demon. The Warrens and journalist Robert Curran published a book about the incident with The Haunted: One Family’s Nightmare (1986). This was later adapted into a tv movie The Haunted (1991) with Stephen Markle and Diane Baker as Ed and Lorraine. It should be noted that, aside from the Warrens and Smurls, nobody else who investigated, including the Catholic Church, was able to obtain evidence of any phenomena.
I am about fed up with The Conjuring films and their constant spinning of bunkum and wacky religious ideas out as being true. I will say it again, all evidence suggests that Warrens were self-promoting frauds who never concerned themselves with factuality or proof so much as whether something could be spun for a good story and PR value.
At least The Conjuring: Last Rites seems determined to live up to its Last Rites name. It has been announced that this will be the last Conjuring film featuring the Warrens (although does not rule out any further spinoffs). It is not until the 80-minute mark (sixty percent of the way into the film) before the Warrens come out of retirement due to Ed’s heart-attack (that occurred in The Devil Made Me Do It). A lot of the time before that concerns itself with the non horror stuff of them walking away from being investigators and the rise of the next generation. (With both Ed and Lorraine now having passed away, it feels as though this is the chance by the real-life daughter Judy and her husband Tony Spera, who are consultants to the film, to get their five minutes in the limelight). The end credits are filled with a good many real-life video clips and photos of the Warrens, although rather than serving as a homage, this unfortunately tends to show them up as the cranks they are. It does them no credit when these scenes also show them posing in front of the known hoax of the Amityville house.
James Wan is a genre director par excellence. His first two Conjuring outings have a genuinely spooky and haunted feel even as you decry the nonsense they promote. I have far less enthusiasm for James Wan the brand name. He has been someone happy to sell out and lend his name to a bunch of genre films irrespective of quality – almost any of the assorted Annabelle and Nun films could be included here. This unfortunately leads us to Michael Chaves who first appeared with The Curse of La Llorona and went on to make The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It and The Nun II, all within The Conjuring Universe.
Wan has an instinctive mastery of genre effect; by contrast, Michael Chaves inundates the screen with any effect he can like it is a Halloween haunt and contrarily produces no effect at all. Watching The Conjuring: Last Rites feels less like watching the continuation of a series that started with eerie effect than it does a film made by an amateur in the game who thinks going boo and throwing anything in his arsenal at us equals that same effect. The constant profusion of jumps kills any atmosphere.
The Conjuring: Last Rites is a film filled with pop-up effects like people seeing hideously aged figures or sinister smiling reflections of their faces in the mirror wherever they go, or Vera Farmiga having visions of her kitchen sink overflowing with blood as she does the dishes. There is a laughable lack of effect to a scene where Elliot Cowan is levitated up off a bed. There is the utter ridiculousness of the scene where priest Steve Coulter goes to see the bishop only to find he is alone in an empty waiting room and then receives taunting phone calls, where his crucifix bursts into flame as he attempts to confront … a darkness that emerges from the bishop’s office whereupon he is then driven to hang himself over the balcony with a cleaner’s electric cable. It feels exactly like it is more a leftover novelty death from one of The Omen sequels.
The climactic scenes around the house and the fake dramas that seem to be contrived to ramp up tension are almost laughable. Where the struggle to carry the mirror downstairs ends up in dramatic moments of people putting their feet through the drywall of the ceiling; where Vera Farmiga has a vision that the cellar has turned into a pool of blood and she is drowning in it; where son-in-law-to-be Ben Hardy rushes to the scene but is caused to skid on the road and crash by seeing another hideous figure on the road in front of him; where Ed starts having a heart-attack again; and where Judy briefly becomes possessed.
After being introduced in the prologue, the whole idea of the occult mirror really amounts to a big nothingburger. It falls too much into comparison to Mike Flanagan’s far superior Oculus (2013). For all the build-up, the climax of the film rather absurdly consists of no more than Patrick Wilson and Elliot Cowan trying to carry the mirror out of the attic and downstairs and then visions of … seeing the mirror rotate.
(Winner in this site’s Worst Films of 2025 list).
Trailer here