I liked The
Conjuring, and I mostly like The
Conjuring 2. While their jump scares are a bit predictable, they generally
create a good, spooky, disturbing atmosphere mixed with entertaining
ghost-hunting pseudoscience (and pseudotech), and the two leads are very
watchable and likeable. The Annabelle
spinoff/prequel was complete schlock crap, but I didn't expect it to be
anything else, and regardless, well, let's just say I didn't exactly spend a
great deal of money to watch it, if you catch my drift. I wasn't exactly taken
with the idea of another film, a prequel to the prequel, but when I heard it
was getting decent reviews, I thought "Why not?"
Annabelle:
Creation feels like a few things. Firstly it feels like a
film which, way back at some point in the development process, was meant to
subvert some of the recurring elements of the Conjuring franchise and some clichés of modern horror films. The
reason I say "way back", however, is because it also feels like a
film which was rewritten by a Hollywood hack at some point. It thirdly feels,
with two overt links to other films, one already made and one forthcoming, as
another desperate attempt on the part of Warner Bros. to establish a "cinematic
universe" surrounding, I suppose, the demons featured in the Conjuring films.
The ever-credible Wikipedia informs me that director
David F. Sandberg, filmmaker of Lights
Out, took a less meticulously-storyboarded approach to this film, instead
opting for a "figure it out on the set" one. I believe this is PR
speak for "Warner Bros. and New Line didn't give me enough time and money
to make this properly." This shows, as while Lights Out is hardly a masterpiece, it perhaps still has threads of
Sandberg's YouTube viral-video auteurship in it, while Annabelle: Creation simply feels botched, like the half-made dolls
in the eponymous character's father's workshop.
Annabelle:
Creation's strongest moments almost entirely occur in its
first half, seemingly before the scripting or editing process, or both,
collapsed. While the premise of a group of vulnerable girls and resident nun
being sent to live in a somewhat spooky house out in the country is hardly
original, the film appears to be possibly doing something vaguely interesting
with Janice and Linda, two orphans hoping to become "real sisters" if
they are adopted by the same couple. This follows a fairly engrossing prologue
in which the titular Annabelle, innocent originator of the notes the doll would
come to drop, is abruptly hit by a car.
The problem is that this feeling of engagement
starts to fall apart when Janice, predictably, makes not one but repeated trips
to the dead girl's bedroom, almost as if she's a robot programmed to seek out
horror scenes. You'd think after having one spooky experience in there, as well
as finding the creepy doll, she'd tell that bedroom where to shove it, forcing
the demon to get a bit more creative, but that doesn't happen, and virtually
the rest of the film becomes a series of endless lead-ups to Janice or, later,
Linda, making sojourns to the late Annabelle's bedroom just to get spooked
again. I was finding the film reasonably enjoyable up until the point at which,
on Janice's second or third trip to the room, she witnesses what appears to be
an apparition of the dead girl. However, as we later discover, it's just a
demon pretending, and when Janice asks what she wants, she abruptly turns
around, adopts the yellow-eyed fanged horror face that every Conjuring demon has, and proclaims
"Your soul!" I was staggered at how unbelievably stock, generic and
cliché this moment was, especially in contrast to promise shown to that point, and
from this moment the film started to fail.
In this regard the film is infected with innumerable
clichés once it loses its drive, especially ones which make the Conjuring franchise as a whole seem
repetitive and stale: demons levitating people, demons telekinetically throwing
furniture around, the ancient trick of flickering lightbulbs and of course, a
more modern favourite, fleeing people being tripped and dragged by the ankles
back the way they came by an unseen force. The glimpses we get of the demon
itself show something appallingly generic, just a charcoal-skinned hornéd beastie
let loose from a medieval woodcut. Janice also gets trapped, frightened and
subsequently possessed in a manner highly reminiscent of the original Paranormal Activity film, especially
once she starts pretending she's fine when she obviously isn't. The barrage of
these desperately unimaginative moments makes the film predictable and, as a
result, boring, surely the worst sin a horror film can commit.
What makes this so exasperating is that the film
itself has some strong elements. As was the case with The Conjuring films, it gives a decent share of screen time to a
relatively large cast of relatively talented young actors; Janice and Linda are
particularly well cast, and their performances when they're still trying to
figure out their situation are fairly believable and likeable. The biggest
problem is when Janice is forced into the boring, routine
"possession" role which basically just means she becomes a child-sized
knife slasher with a creepy head tilt and waxy makeup. There is, however, some
effective use of humour, particularly derived from Linda's behaviour: her
willingness to leave Janice inside so she can go enjoy herself when Janice says
she's fine, her quick departure to avoid chores in the schoolroom and, best of
all, the cut from her declining to enter Annabelle's room (perhaps the only
time anyone makes this sensible choice) to a shot of her guarding her own
bedroom door against the fiend with a popgun she acquired earlier.
Yet none of this can compensate for what is perhaps
the film's biggest failing, a huge problem with pacing and structure, which
coalesces with the bombardment of horror clichés to make the viewing experience
of the last half-hour or so of the film tedious to the point of absurdity.
Miranda Otto, out for a quick buck, is forced to deliver an extremely clunky
exposition-dump immediately prior to her character being killed off, revealing
the origin of the demon in their home in a way that was partially obvious or
could have been guessed and partially could have been teased out through more
gradual storytelling. This hurls what should be the start of the film's climax
into a series of flashbacks. Furthermore, the film ends with an entirely
unnecessary epilogue linking this film's events directly and explicitly to that
of the previous Annabelle film, as if
anyone cared or remembered, assuming they'd seen it at all. Footage is reused
from early in that film to anticlimactically end this one. I also believe that
this involves some torturous storytelling, as the original film simply said the
doll was used by a demon after a cult ritual involving Annabelle, the
neighbours' wayward daughter. Now "Annabelle" is actually a demon
pretending to be a dead girl named Annabelle who possesses Janice who then calls
herself Annabelle who is adopted by the neighbours in the first film and grows
up to be the cultist, who then I think somehow puts the demon back into the
doll, as if it would want to go back into the doll. Good grief.
The most egregious element, however, is a brief
scene shoehorned into the first act (or so) of the film in which Sister
Charlotte, the girls' guardian, shows Annabelle's father a photograph of
herself with some other nuns, one of which is actually Valak, the demon from The Conjuring 2. This is obviously done
not just as a reference but as a piece of promotion for 2018's upcoming
"The Nun" film about the character, as the scene bears no other real
relevance to the plot or characterisation of this film. It's clearly another
pathetic attempt to rip off Disney/Marvel's successful, yet increasingly bland
and soulless, "cinematic universe" method, as Warner Bros. already
tried (and presumably has failed) to do with King Arthur: Legend of the Sword and Universal is apparently
attempting with its dare-I-dignify-it-by-naming-it "Dark Universe"
franchise. By this stage it is so transparent that all it accomplishes is
making the surrounding film less immersive and damaging further any possibility
of suspending disbelief. This is exacerbated by a moment in the epilogue when Janice-possessed-by-the-Annabelle-demon is given a Raggedy Ann doll, which is what the "real" Annabelle doll is. The wink to the know-alls (like me) in the audience is just distracting, and it only leaves me thinking that using a Raggedy Ann doll would actually have been a lot creepier, if done well, than the overdesigned doll of the films, which I can't imagine anyone from even the most twisted era of American nursery culture not finding grotesque.
Fair play to David F. Sandberg for making the
transition from YouTube to Hollywood; his wife Lotta Losten, star of the
original Lights Out short, makes a
cameo in this, but unfortunately in the risible and exhausting epilogue
sequence. That doesn't change the fact, however, that Annabelle: Creation is a film I shouldn't have allowed to
disappoint me. Maybe someone who really cares could make a worthy fan edit of
this, eliminating CGI demon-faces, multiple trips to Annabelle's bedroom, the
epilogue and perhaps a sequence in which Linda, having laboriously descended the
house in the dumbwaiter, then decides to make the entire journey to the top
again in real time. The fact is, if more people had given a shit, this could
have genuinely been a standout piece of franchise horror-schlock. It might, for
instance, have used its premise to consider in some depth the crises of faith
and hope of orphans and people in similar situations of limited emotional
support. It might have used Janice and Linda's friendship to put a different
spin on the 'lone girl getting menaced in a spooky room' concept. It could even
have gone down more of a comedy route, mixing chills with gags for an
experiment with a sine-wave of mood. It doesn't, however, yet people are still
offering it praise. I simply don't understand why. To my mind, this is for Conjuring franchise completionists only,
if indeed it's for anyone at all.
