The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (2021)
Directed by Michael Chaves; screenplay by David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick; starring Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson and Ruairie O’Connor.
2/5
With every supernatural horror film “based on true events” there’s always an undercurrent that, somewhere in the real world, an event occurred upon which enough reasonable doubt has been cast that there’s room for creative license to embellish and fictionalize without much controversy. It usually works because the real world becomes a bit of a distant memory – “based on” is generally the operative word.
Some films lean into this conflict between the natural and supernatural to great effect – take a look at The Exorcism of Emily Rose, for an example with many parallels here – but a lot of films just use the label as a mark of authenticity in an attempt to give a narrative an added layer of plausibility. A lot of the time films tend to slap this label on anyway, regardless of whether it’s based on anything at all. An issue that frequently appears with films that are actually based on real events, though, is that if care isn’t taken they can quickly start to move into some fairly exploitative territory.
I suppose it in large part depends on your belief in the supernatural or whatever force is present in the text, but for those of us not quite convinced, or even just agnostic on the matter, there’s often a nagging sensation that some likely more tragic – if less conventionally compelling (but isn’t that the crux) – tale is going untold.
With all of the Conjuring films, this is to say the actual Conjuring films of which this is the third, not those of the spinoff universe they spawned, there’s a little of this feeling ever-present, mainly because each one follows the work of the real investigators of the paranormal, Ed and Lorraine Warren.
Up to now, James Wan has always seemed to know where the line is. He’s never appeared to be trying to depict events as they happened. Ed and Lorraine are fictionalised characters for him, there to help the plot progress, not take centre-stage. Wan’s depictions aren’t necessarily without issue, but there seems enough good faith in each of his outings that it some reasonable to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Unfortunately, The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (alternative title: Ed and Lorraine Revise the Satanic Panic) takes things further, much as Wan replacement Michael Chaves (known for his disappointing work on the other Conjuring universe flick, The Curse of La Llorona) has expressed his desire for the opposite effect.
We open on what would usually be reserved for the climax: the exorcism of the young David Glatzel (Julian Hilliard), who looks to be pretty unequivocally possessed by an evil spirit, at the hands of Ed (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) Warren. It’s a dramatic opener, and for me it actually worked well. It was fresh to see the film break from tradition somewhat, for it to come out swinging.
It’s not long before things escalate even further – we finally see just how those huge claw marks decorating the walls got to be there – and an ordained priest is sent for. But the entity within David won’t let the poor boy go without a fight, and it takes Arne Johnson (Ruairi O’Connor), the boyfriend of David’s older sister, Debbie (Sarah Catherine Hook), inviting the beast into himself to temporarily halt the chaos.
Days later, Arne has been suffering from horrific visions and has fallen squarely into the demon’s grasp. Things quickly take a turn for the violent when Arne, seeing a spectral figure bearing down upon him and seemingly acting in self-defence, stabs his landlord, Bruno Sauls (Ronnie Gene Blevins), to death. It’s a shocking moment not least because it’s the first fatality we’ve actually seen in The Conjuring series.
It’s also one of the few times Ed and Lorraine’s world of the paranormal has ever come into conflict with the corporeal in explicit terms. The rest of the film traces Ed and Lorraine’s hunt for tangible evidence to present to the court in order to corroborate Arne’s historic defence that he was indeed under the thrall of a demon – to save him from the death penalty.
This time around, we’re not constricted to a single, haunted house. Ed and Lorraine’s mission leads them all over the local area, scouring it for evidence of other, similar paranormal activity that might be linked. The Devil Made Me Do It is more police-procedural with a heavy dose of the supernatural than it is a traditional Conjuring film.
Obviously, when you completely change the format of a series, you’ll inevitably need to find something the audience can latch onto to replace what they found so compelling about the original format. For me, in The Conjuring and The Conjuring 2, the film’s connective tissue wasn’t Ed and Lorraine and their relationship. They were important figures, of course, but the home, the families involved, these things took on a huge amount of the workload of engaging the viewer.
In this third installment, though, Ed and Lorraine take on far more of an important role out of sheer necessity. They’re now the only thing able to tie all the disparate elements of the film together, to keep things on track and give the audience an emotional anchor. And this is where that thrumming headache of that ethical minefield begins to flare up.
Ed and Lorraine’s centrality in this story about an actual real-world murder case lends them a far greater weight to throw about, they’re no longer harmless-at-best investigators there to try to get to the bottom of why a family’s house goes bump at night, they’re real figures in legal history – they’re actually hoping to impact the judicial process and the film seems to take on a kind of activist nature, at times playing like a Sorkin legal drama, complete with its resplendent sense of entitled righteousness and Sorkinisms.
The film is also putting more of an emphasis on Lorraine’s role here too (Ed’s put frequently out of commission by issues with his heart) but the lip service paid to progressive ideas rings incredibly hollow, and not just because Ed comes running to his wife’s rescue when she wanders in too deep. It is eventually revealed that the Warrens, this time around, are fighting an all too corporeal foe. That is, a Satanist whose motives are never really explicated and whose methods apparently involve tempting young girls into the woods with forbidden love, and corrupting the wholly innocent youth of America.
Even beyond all this, the whole thing relies purely on your anticipation of that next jump scare lurking just around the corner. Clearly, a lot of work has been put into giving each set piece a slight twist, in the hopes that it won’t be recognised for, ultimately, the runtime padding that it is. But when the scares are so telegraphed and the structure so disappointingly formulaic it just doesn’t work.
You’ll generally be able to tell when things are going to get spooky again because the film grows so clearly tired of hearing its characters yattering on. One scene is taken to explain what’s going, then the next balances it out with – as Mark Kermode puts it – the quiet-quiet-BANG formula.
This isn’t even to mention the dialogue apparently being written with the sole purpose of its being cut and pasted into trailers – it’s that cliché and disjointed – or the rather uninspired visuals and characters.
Considering the franchise’s rocky track record, if now even the Conjuring universe’s flagship entries can no longer keep themselves afloat, it doesn’t bode well for the series’ future. It’s probably best you give this one a miss, there are plenty better things to watch.
Watched on 1st June 2021