Annabelle Comes Home

Like any franchise that just won’t quit, The Conjuring is back with its newest instalment, Annabelle Comes Home. Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) are quasi-well-known psychics who have amassed a collection of the world’s most evil objects, locking them away. Why? One simple response would be they’re serial hoarders. Yet, the most plausible answer seems to be so that the latest Annabelle film can play out with a thinly stretched docket of wicked spirits to arise.

That’s the most glaring feature of the movie; there’s no commonality between the demonic characters. You will leave your seat neither knowing which demons were featured to scare and shock you nor satisfied by their motivations. With that, the internal logic falls in on itself continuously. The host of spectres stockpiled in the basement looks more like the costume cupboard in a fancy school’s drama department: cluttered, expensive and often unremarkable.

Nonetheless, the feature does present sweet moments of awkward teen romance, a pleasing 70s set design and a familiar plot. To say the least: it’s set in suburbia, where a young daughter is bullied at school for her affinity with the psychic realm, her babysitter is a blond sweetheart and her babysitter’s cookie-cutter crush is a sweet but adorable grocery packer. If you can, like many of us, ignore various plot holes arising in the script until your confusion is wishfully patched over with a flippant line of dialogue in the name of Annabelle causing havoc elsewhere in the home, you can enjoy this low-stakes and comfortable film.

Annabelle Comes Home tinkers with comedy and psychological horror though struggles to arrive as something cohesive. To make sure you know the bad stuff is really coming, hazy fog continuously seeps into the house until the screen is so misted up you are sceptical that someone may be trying to make this easy-to-poke-through movie a lot harder to see.

Mary-Catherine Harvey

Annabelle Comes Home is released nationwide on 10^th July 2019.

Watch the trailer for Annabelle Comes Home here: