The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It | Little White Lies

The Con­jur­ing: The Dev­il Made Me Do It

27 May 2021 / Released: 28 May 2021

Two men in a forest setting, one assisting the other who appears to be injured or distressed.
Two men in a forest setting, one assisting the other who appears to be injured or distressed.
4

Anticipation.

Anything with Devil in the title.

3

Enjoyment.

The Warrens are spooky power couple goals.

2

In Retrospect.

Not enough scares, not enough devil, but glorious Warren scenes.

The third instal­ment in the hor­ror fran­chise gives us a lot of Ed and Lor­raine War­ren, but not near­ly enough Satan.

The third instal­ment in The Con­jur­ing fran­chise (which has already spawned spin-offs The Nun and the Annabelle series, with anoth­er one based around The Crooked Man in the works) is the first not to be direct­ed by mod­ern hor­ror mas­ter James Wan, who is well accus­tomed to acci­den­tal­ly launch­ing lucra­tive hor­ror fran­chis­es (see Saw; Insid­i­ous). It also has to over­come the hur­dle of hav­ing no instant­ly recog­nis­able super­nat­ur­al case to solve.

The first Con­jur­ing film focused on the real-life haunt­ing of the Per­ron fam­i­ly, while the sequel tack­led both the Ami­tyville and the Enfield pol­ter­geist, two of the most well-doc­u­ment­ed para­nor­mal cas­es in his­to­ry. All of these have had mul­ti­ple screen adap­ta­tions, giv­ing the sto­ries of the pre­vi­ous films a lev­el of spooky brand recog­ni­tion that The Con­jur­ing 3 just doesn’t have (at least not in the UK).

The real-life inci­dent that forms the basis of this film is that of Arne John­son, known in the US as the Dev­il Made Me Do It’ case. The plot once again revolves around Ed and Lor­raine War­ren (Patrick Wil­son and Vera Farmi­ga), media-friend­ly seek­ers of the super­nat­ur­al, com­bin­ing the tropes of the pos­ses­sion film with the con­ven­tions of a court­room dra­ma. We begin with the bru­tal exor­cism of a young boy named David, a sequence so packed with con­tor­tion­ist-lev­el body hor­ror, ref­er­ences to The Exor­cist, and scream­ing, that Ed has a heart attack.

Young person splashing in water, splashing and spraying water from inflatable paddling pool.

The demon­ic enti­ty moves from the boy to Arne, a young man liv­ing with the boy’s sis­ter who soon sav­age­ly mur­ders his land­lord. The chal­lenge the War­rens now face is to con­vince a court jury that the man is inno­cent by rea­son of demon­ic pos­ses­sion. The case turns more com­pli­cat­ed, as the War­rens take it upon them­selves to prove that David, Arne and even Ed him­self are pos­sessed by an inhu­man enti­ty con­jured up by one of cinema’s favourite boogey­men: the Satan­ic witch.

I’ll con­fess at this point, I don’t come to The Con­jur­ing films for the ghosts: I come for the War­rens. And on that front, The Con­jur­ing 3 deliv­ers. Ed and Lor­raine bring schmaltz to the super­nat­ur­al. A good chunk of the film is con­cerned with com­mem­o­rat­ing their 30-year rela­tion­ship, show­ing how they fell in love (in a cin­e­ma!) and how much they are still in love, in spite of, or per­haps thanks to, the many encoun­ters with occult forces they have lived through. I’d hap­pi­ly just watch the War­rens alpha­be­tise their room of cursed objects.

On the hor­ror front, how­ev­er, The Con­jur­ing 3 is lack­ing. The film is too com­mit­ted to the jump scare; while Wan’s strength was always to let the cam­era linger and the audi­ence fill in the dark blanks, Michael Chaves (whose direc­to­r­i­al debut was the Wan-pro­duced The Curse of La Llorona) is pre­oc­cu­pied with con­tort­ing bod­ies and dis­tort­ing per­cep­tion. While some of these moments are effec­tive (espe­cial­ly any scene with the young pos­sessed boy), ulti­mate­ly there is no gut punch to the scares because we don’t get to know any of the char­ac­ters that are being affect­ed by the occult forces. Unless it’s the War­rens in dan­ger, it’s hard to care.

What’s even more dis­ap­point­ing is that The Con­jur­ing 3 miss­es the oppor­tu­ni­ty to tap into the Satan­ic Pan­ic of the 1980s. The film had the poten­tial of cre­at­ing a mem­o­rable Satan­ic con­jur­er. Instead, we get mere glimpses of an over­grown Wednes­day Addams look-alike. Hard­ly demon­ic business.

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