A very worthy collection of individual horror scenes, but not a particularly cohesive sequel. Nevertheless, “The Conjuring 2” is head and shoulders above much of what has been filmed in the horror genre in the last couple of years.
In the town of Enfield, England, supernatural phenomena begin in the home of single mother Peggy Hodgson (Frances O’Connor). It all starts with Peggy’s youngest daughter, Janet (Madison Wolfe), but since the girl is known as a liar, she is not immediately believed. And when the manifestations of evil become obvious even to casual observers, the poltergeist goes so far that even the paranormal experts Ed (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) Warren, invited from the States, will find it difficult to cope.
Before filming began, James Wan invited a priest to the set, who blessed the crew and consecrated the decorations. The filming went smoothly.
It’s pleasing when directors remain true to their favorite genre, and James Wan will definitely continue to delight us with horror films for a long time – even though other genres (see “Furious 7”) submit to him as easily as horror. However, “The Conjuring 2,” despite its external spectacle and mainstream appeal in a good way, is in some sense a passing film, created not because the author stumbled upon an interesting, captivating story, but because he felt an itch to film something.
For the sake of “The Conjuring 2,” Wan turned down the filming of “Fast & Furious 8” – despite the fact that he was offered a fee for its production that was “capable of changing life forever.”
The structure of “The Conjuring 2” is best described as a construction set of identical blocks, but these blocks, in this case, are not stacked on top of each other, but laid out side by side – so that they can be interchanged, rearranged, and even removed altogether without threatening the structure (what would have changed without the episode in the semi-flooded basement?). The real story of the poltergeist in Enfield (more or less intelligibly, albeit without doubts about its mystical nature, told in a recent mini-series from the BBC with Timothy Spall) has not so much in common with what is happening in “The Conjuring 2” – Wan reworked it to fit his usual “astral” style and broke it down into a series of loosely connected suspense scenes.
In the series “The Enfield Haunting” mentioned in the review, Ed and Lorraine Warren do not appear, and in the film, in turn, another important participant in the events in Enfield, present in the series, is not even mentioned – Guy Playfair.
Standalone Horror Shorts
Each of these scenes is practically a complete horror short film, realized with the dizzying virtuosity of a true maestro, unusually sensitive to the genre. Whether it’s an episode recreating the events in the infamous Amityville, Lorraine Warren’s encounter with a demonic nun in her home, or Ed’s interrogation of a ghost who has set his sights on Janet, each of them has everything to make the viewer feel pleasant goosebumps – brilliant cinematography, precise editing, masterful makeup.
Lack of Cohesion
But at the same time, the core on which these individual horror scenes are strung, to put it bluntly, “doesn’t hold up.” Pseudo-real events do not fit well with rather “cartoonish” monsters (the Hunchback stands out especially, who would seem caricatured even within the framework of a more or less family-friendly “Astral”), and the overall logic of the Warrens’ paranormal investigation (a scribbled Bible, encrypted messages from a ghost, a demon wandering around the world) sometimes borders on outright nonsense.
It is clear why this was done – Wan did not set out to adapt the story of the Enfield poltergeist closely to the text; he needed to create a mass horror show in which the viewer, as in a horror attraction, is taken on a toy train from one “room of fear” to another – with a couple of breaks for the toilet (in “The Conjuring 2,” this purpose is served by Lorraine’s melodramatic line of fear for her husband – a little alien, but still very sweet). From this point of view, he coped with his task perfectly, as evidenced by the impressive box office receipts – although, frankly, two and a half hours is too much for such a film; with such a duration, even the most competently implemented screamers begin to tire at some point.