Review: The Conjuring 2

The Conjuring 2 (15)

USA 2016 134 mins Dir: James Wan Cast: Patrick Wilson, Vera Farmiga, Frances O’Connor, Simon McBurney, Madison Wolfe, Franka Potente

There’s always a perverse thrill to watching a good old creaky haunted house chiller – but when the supernatural bumps and bangs are transplanted to an ordinary London suburb in The Conjuring 2, it gains an added frisson. No longer are the ghouls stalking the corridors of a remote country pile, but the kind of seemingly banal British residence that otherwise would barely pass muster.

Of course this is one of the reasons why the true story on which The Conjuring 2 is based, the notorious Enfield Poltergeist hauntings, created such a media firestorm in the late 1970s. The very notion of a malevolent presence tormenting an everyday London family got everybody thinking that it could happen to them, and it’s this scenario that provides returning director James Wan with a great deal of mileage.

Having brought to life the Perron family hauntings in unexpected 2013 smash The Conjuring, one that introduced us to married supernatural investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga), Wan now crosses the pond in a heavily dramatised take on the true story of the Hodgson family. Mother Peggy (Frances O’Connor) is in the wake of a recent divorce and is barely keeping her brood of four children together. But that’s nothing compared to what happens when daughter Janet (Madison Wolfe) becomes the unwanted target of a vicious apparition that causes her to levitate and speak in a guttural voice whilst making furniture move around violently of its own accord.

Terrified for their lives, the Hodgsons reach out to the church and subsequently enlist the help of the Warrens, along with paranormal investigator Maurice Grosse (Simon McBurney). At least, that’s half the story: Lorraine is herself experiencing a crisis of faith, being tormented by a demonic presence in a nun’s outfit stemming from her involvement in America’s notorious Amityville hauntings from a couple of years earlier.

It’s a development that Wan attempts to dovetail with the British narrative as events proceed although the transition is not altogether smooth, the audience seemingly getting two movies for the price of one. It also accounts for the somewhat bloated running time that sees a whole hour evaporate before the Warrens set foot in Blighty. But overstuffed and lacking in focus though the movie is, it also demonstrates Wan’s palpable love of every ghostly cliche in the book. It shares a kinship with the first Conjuring‘s gleefully old-fashioned atmosphere, with no door too creaky and no corridor too dark.

Of course what really chilled the blood in the real-life Enfield case, itself highly contested as a hoax by numerous experts, was the very banality of the location, the eerie snaps of the kids’ bedroom with its Starsky and Hutch posters seemingly flying in the face of supernatural cliche. Wan’s natural instinct is to crank everything up courtesy of Don Burgess’ spectral cinematography, Julie Berghoff’s mouldering production design and Joseph Bishara’s eerie score (the latter incorporating the Crooked Man nursery rhyme as a harbinger of one of the film’s key supernatural additions). Effective for the most part, ultimately the movie’s factual basis collapses in a heap of shrieky stinger scares, especially in the disappointingly convoluted final 30 minutes.

Nevertheless, although Wan does indulge his somewhat tiresome excesses, the movie does demonstrate that he also has a genuine capacity for quietly skin-prickling terror. One beautifully blood-curdling moment sees Wilson impressively hold an entire close-up shot for a couple of minutes whilst, out of focus in the background, we’re dimly aware of a terrifying demonic shift coming over the innocent young character of Janet as she’s seemingly possessed by the film’s entity, a monstrous presence by the name of Bill Wilkins (whose alleged voice from the actual investigations can be heard over the end credits).

Wolfe’s performance as the afflicted, persecuted girl at the centre of the horror is terrific, genuinely moving in one key sequence as she spills out her heart to Lorraine and reveals how the haunting has effectively caused her life to come to a halt. As before Wilson and Farmiga are believably warm and tender, grounding the histrionics in recognisable humanity whilst also injecting sly humour when necessary. It’s these quieter moments that help ensure the movie gets under the skin, as well as obliterating our senses with relentless boo moments.