Hindsight: A 2018 Cinematic Retrospective

I saw quite a few films of 2018 in 2018 itself, although I suspect I saw more non-2018 films. Maybe I should do a post about that instead.

Films I haven't seen yet but might in future

Early Man

I like Aardman, and the teaser I saw was kind of amusing, but I admit that I was put off when I saw in the full trailer that this was going to be a football movie with a claymation cave man facade over the top, and by the time I checked to see when it was coming out it turned out that it had already been released and left cinemas, so there's a good example of marketing gone wrong.

Isle of Dogs

I dunno about this one. I saw the trailer too many times before other films and it didn't grab me.

A Quiet Place

I just got this on blu-ray so I intend to watch it very soon.

Update: Hmm. It's stylish and well-made, but I found it to be a bit "Hollywood" in terms of plot and character, at least after the little kid was killed off at the beginning, which was a satisfyingly ballsy move for such an otherwise emotionally predictable film. Other elements, like the generic nuclear family, the difficult relationship between the dad and his teenage kids, and the self-sacrifice at the ending, were all somewhat safe. Supposedly the writer/director (who was in the US Office, which I've never seen) was inspired in relation to the anxiety of being a new parent or something – as if that's some groundbreaking subject matter. The final shot was pure cheese too, which I felt undermined the film's mood, but perhaps it was intentional. Emily Blunt's good in it, I suppose, but everyone expects her to be. As I say, a very solid film but perhaps too straight-laced for a weirdo like me.

Super Troopers 2

The original Super Troopers is a sort of 'cult if you were a teenage boy in the early 2000s' dumb comedy for which I have a certain affection. Apparently this sequel was crowdfunded, presumably by the same people now adults with disposable incomes. I doubt it even got a theatrical release over here.

Deadpool 2

I wanted to see this but it came out at the same time as Infinity War and Solo and something had to give, especially as I saw those two films with people interested to see them, while I didn't know about anyone who cared about Deadpool 2 who hadn't seen it already.

Bad Times at the El Royale

Apparently this is good. I want to see it too.

Halloween (2018)

I have a weirdly high knowledge of the Halloween franchise despite having only seen some of the first one, as a result of watching Cinemassacre videos. I know they already tried a 'let's ignore the earlier sequels' sequel with Halloween H20, and it was weird but interesting to hear that they were doing it again. Maybe I should watch the original (and the first sequel? Does H20 follow that?), H20, and this one, and see what I think.

Suspiria (2018)

I only watched the original Suspiria (1977) this year – I liked it a lot; my kind of thing – and I have to admit that I was a bit concerned that a remake would probably prioritise storytelling over atmosphere. I've heard this is good, but I'm not in a rush to see it.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

They're been very clever with the marketing for this because I initially thought that this was Spider-Man: Far From Home when I saw the poster. I've heard it's good but the superhero exhaustion has been pretty overwhelming this year.

Aquaman

I just couldn't be bothered. I suppose I'd be kind of curious to see Patrick Wilson hamming it up as Ocean Master?

Update: Well it's no Wonder Woman (or Shazam! for that matter) but it's all right. It's too long and the undersea CGI action is weightless and lacking in stakes, but as an over-the-top underwater melodrama crossed with a superhero film crossed with a bit of an adventure film it's not that bad. At times it does take itself too seriously, and Mamoa and Heard really lack the acting chops to be a particularly effective leading pair, but I did find something entertaining about how simultaneously ambitious and predictable it was. It exceeded my admittedly very low expectations.

Films on my radar that I actively didn't want to see

Ready Player One

God damn this sounds lame.

Venom

Too many superhero films! Go away! Apparently this did big money in China or something.

Johnny English Strikes Again

Did Rowan Atkinson want to buy a new car or something?

Films I saw

Black Panther

I have to be honest; I wasn't that into this film. I didn't find the characters terribly interesting apart from Kilmonger, with whom I sympathised more than T'Challa, the end battle was the usual CGI sleeping aid, and I've got to put it out there: I find the idea of Wakanda as basically a Western-style metropolis with a culture that's a mashup of existing African elements both limited and... uh... kinda racist. To clarify, I felt this because I felt like it implied that different African cultures were interchangeable and homogeneous, and it also implied that Western-style urbanisation was correlative with being "advanced". I mean, I'm a white guy, so it's not really up to me to make those kinds of claims about it, and people in general loved it, which is obviously a good thing, but it just wasn't my cup of tea.

The Death of Stalin

This was a damn good film. Armando Iannucci's political comedy is always terrific (see The Thick of It and Veep – I'm not devoted enough to have watched Brass Eye, yet at any rate) and the combination of a top notch cast with an absurd but real situation in an absurd but real setting makes for an excellent satire of powerful people, and how their ridiculousness is often hand-in-hand with their power. Obviously Steve Buscemi is great as Krushchev, but the highlight for me, beyond Jason Isaacs' turn as Zhukov, was seeing Michael Palin back in action as Molotov; very pleasant to see that he's still got it. For Iannucci, it was interesting to see how his stylings could be deployed in a setting in which, unlike his twenty-first century tv series, violence could openly be used as a political tool, which increased the pitch-blackness of the humour to even greater levels.

Avengers: Infinity War

I took a long time to see this because I was burnt out on superheroes after Black Panther, but in the end I enjoyed it much more than I expected. The huge cast was all used reasonably well, especially the Guardians of the Galaxy – proving unfortunately, but I suppose in a timely fashion, that they don't need James Gunn – and obviously Josh Brolin was pretty compelling as Thanos, even if wiping out half of all life in the universe would only delay overpopulation for a few decades at the most. I guess he's not "the mad Titan" or no reason. Ultimately my only serious objection to this film is the boring battle scene at the end in which the supposedly super-advanced Wakandans line up in a row like the Battle of Hastings and let Thanos' alien dogs run at them. What happened to those gunships from the Black Panther film? A couple of machine-gun nests would have annihilated Thanos' troops. Basically what I mean is that this final battle could have been presented in a much more interesting way. Other than that it was actually pretty good.

Solo: A Star Wars Story

Messy, pointless and forgettable, a handful of engaging elements can't elevate this misconceived piece of product above the weight of its sloppy execution. I don't have enough to say about this to bother going any further; check out my first impressions post here if you want to read more, or see my Star Wars Rankings article for why I consider this to be better than overrated fan darling Rogue One.

Hereditary

A very effective horror film, albeit not one that completely blew me away instantly, Hereditary seems to be one of those films that bears a bit of thought. I do think the plot, ultimately, was a little bit safe, featuring a dead grandmother making a pact with a demon for wealth and power in return for the soul of her grandchildren, but in this respect Hereditary almost felt like the plot of the Paranormal Activity franchise done in a classy and stylish way. The lack of jump scares is very satisfying, and the general sense of morbid dread that hangs across the whole thing is affecting; particularly noteworthy is the moment in which Charlie is decapitated in a drunk driving accident and the traumatised Peter leaves her body in the car to be found the next morning. The use of the house models to reflect the family's situation, while a little direct, also contributes to a disturbing tone. It's a very well-made film; not the most adventurous horror film of recent years, but effective nonetheless.

Incredibles 2

Is it enough to say "it was good, but not as good as The Incredibles?" The first film is one of my favourite films of all time, so this one had a lot to live up to. Despite sounding old (apart from the voice of Dash, who was recast and whose voice actor I think was actually a little better than the first one), the returning cast do a good job, and it was nice that this film focused on Helen to a greater extent than Bob. That being said, the characterisation of the two non-superhero main characters was a little confusing regarding why one loved and the other hated superheroes respectively, and I found the ending a bit bland. I dunno. Supposedly this was meant to come out in 2019 but because production was running more smoothly than that of Toy Story 4 their release dates were swapped, and a little part of me really would have liked to have seen what this film could have become if it was given those extra months. Also, continuing the story directly after the first film was an odd choice. Obviously it would have been repetitive to have pulled a Toy Story 3 on it and have set it a real-time number of years later, but I think a focus on new characters wouldn't have hurt; then again, I enjoyed the focus on Helen. As I say, it's a decent sequel, but it could probably never have lived up to the original.

Ant-Man and the Wasp

Apparently people liked this. Really? I thought it was miserable, trying to do comedy but with constant punchline and pacing misfires such that every joke fell flat. I was legitimately keen for a team-up film, especially as this was the first time in Marvel films that a woman superhero was a separate title character. Frankly, I was quite disappointed by this film. I was expecting something funnier and more exciting. Michael Douglas comes across as confused and frustrated (not as Hank Pym the character but in real life), Paul Rudd has even fewer opportunities to actually be funny and Evangeline Lily just has to play the boring humourless characterisation again. Maybe I was just tired when I saw it.

Christopher Robin

A film in which the trailer reveals literally everything that happens, I was also a bit let down by this one. The premise of an adult Christopher Robin having to reassess his priorities after Pooh Bear and friends come back into his life is interesting, but there just wasn't much to this. I know it's a kids' film but it's still predictable and safe. I enjoyed the amusingly Bolshie ending in which Christopher Robin solves his employer's financial hardship by declaring they should make affordable products for the poor, but Mark Gatiss can piss off. Ewan McGregor is reliable, as is veteran Pooh voice Jim Cummings (although why a British Christopher Robin's treasured toy would have an American accent is unexplained) but it's a bit of a waste of Hayley Atwell in a supporting role.

The Nun

To quote myself last time regarding Annabelle: Creation, "it's crap." See my full review here.

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald

Or, as I came to call it, Fantastic Beasts: The Sex Crimes of Grindelwald or Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Johnny Depp. I actually quite liked the first Fantastic Beasts film so it was a shame that this one was such a mess, particularly by bringing back far too many characters from the first film whose stories were over (Queenie, Jacob, Credence Clearwater Revival) and having an utterly pointless twist-untwist-twist exposition dump at the end of the second act which meant nothing and served no purpose. I appreciated JK Rowling's novelistic approach to screenwriting in the first film, but in this one it made the film cumbersome and lacking in narrative thrust. Still, three more films to go so she can presumably only get worse given the decline from the previous film to this one. Also, Johnny Depp is a bloody awful choice as Grindelwald, the entire Grindelwald-Dumbledore story is turned into a boring McGuffin-oriented non-story, and Jude Law is stuck doing a sort of weird Michael Gambon impression.

Holmes & Watson

Subject of walk-outs and being decried as the worst film of 2018, I honestly found this stupid, predictable, lazy and extremely late parody of the Guy Ritchie Holmes films more entertaining than Ant-Man and the Wasp, The Nun or Crimes of Grindelwald. I like the Sherlock Holmes novels and short stories a great deal, but I've always enjoyed the idea of playing up the more cartoonish and buffoonish potential of the characters, and as such I found this to be mildly amusing at points. Probably the biggest problem with it is the waste of talented comedic and dramatic actors including Rob Brydon, Steve Coogan, Ralph Fiennes, Kelly Macdonald and Hugh Laurie in boring and unfunny roles as if someone was worried that they would outperform Will Ferrell. Still, I think John C. Reilly is good value and liked him in this more or less.

Worst film of 2018

I kind of want to give this to Ant-Man and the Wasp because I was so let down by it, but it has to be a toss-up between The Nun and Crimes of Grindelwald. They were both bloody awful, but Crimes of Grindelwald was more boring while The Nun was more incompetent. The Nun was also much shorter than Crimes of Grindelwald and therefore wasted less of my time, so I guess I'll give it to Crimes of Grindelwald.

Best film of 2018

It's either The Death of Stalin or Hereditary. Very different, of course, and very interesting; I think I enjoyed The Death of Stalin more, so I'll give that the title, but Hereditary more than deserves an honourable mention.

"The Nun"

"Hello?"
-Sister Irene, repeatedly

In my review of the overrated Annabelle: Creation (which dummies on the internet apparently think is good), I said the following:

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.

Well the Dark Universe is dead and buried, like Father Burke nearly was, the DC superhero films ("Extended Universe" isn't an official name, apparently) are being carried through the lone strength of Wonder Woman, and King Arthur's definitely still marooned on the Isle of Albion, but with a box office gross amounting to 600% of its budget as of my writing, The Nun seems to have shown that Warner Bros. has got the moneymaking franchise it was dreaming of. If only they could copy Marvel's knack for making lots of money while simultaneously making films which, while genuinely good only very rarely, generally aren't completely accurately describable as "utter shit".

It's surely needless to say that The Nun is bad. The script is extremely lazy, the cinematography is unreliable, the tone is wildly inconsistent and the editing is at points totally appalling. As with Annabelle: Creation, the best thing it has going for it is its cast, who probably could have done something interesting with a better screenplay.

On paper, the premise of The Nun could be intriguing: a grizzled priest and a young nun novice are sent to a remote abbey to investigate why one of the Sisters recently killed herself. The isolated abbey is reviled by the locals and is frustrating to access; it turns out that the convent is in its entirety long dead, and a malevolent intelligence has been imitating its ongoing operation to lure a candidate to the abbey to enable it to escape its confines and export its evil to the wider world.

In all honesty, I liked the implicit ideas of parts of The Nun as I was watching it. All the nuns are dead; the characters are just seeing visions and hearing voices. Are they being guided by heaven or misled by hell? But why bother developing that into an interesting screenplay when you could just string a bunch of jumpscare set-pieces together and call it a day? The marketing sells itself: it has a nice simple title, the memorable image of the villain from The Conjuring 2 and the connection to the wider franchise to stick on the poster. Hordes of teenagers or, as was the case in my screening, bored university students, are looking for just this kind of thing to wile away an evening with some cheap thrills.

To its infinitesimally limited credit, The Nun has maybe one and a half decent set-pieces: one in which Father Burke is buried alive and to an extent one in which a shadow stalks around the walls of a chapel during an apparent prayer. Other than that it's Conjuring jumpscares at their most shallow, largely involving Valak running at one of the protagonists while going "Raar!", a zombie nun falling on or lunging at a protagonist while going "Raar!", or pale claw-like hands bursting out of things and groping people's faces. This is set against the characters mindlessly wandering around the abbey to little apparent purpose.

A few other memorable moments include a very old nun in a veil turning out to be long dead (but this was another idea better in concept than execution) and an absurd flashback to the Middle Ages in which a group of crusaders straight out of a 1950s historical epic seal Valak away using a vial of the blood of none other than Jesus Christ Himself, which is kept in an object which looks like the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch. Sister Irene, our other hero, later uses this to defeat Valak again by spitting it on his face.

While the opening of the film was unimpressive, with two nuns seemingly pointlessly opening a door they knew Valak was behind only to immediately get killed, I thought everything from Father Burke's introduction to his and Irene's arrival at the abbey and their exploration of the cold room and graveyard was adequate. They seemed to have a surprisingly easy time of travel through early 50s communist Romania, traveling to a secluded Catholic abbey in an overwhelmingly Eastern Orthodox country, but I suppose they had to match it to that line from Annabelle: Creation in which Sister Charlotte, who was nowhere to be seen in this, said that she used to be there.

It was mostly after night fell on that first day that things started to go badly wrong, such as Maurice's uninteresting encounter with the demonic image of the dead nun, although as I mentioned Father Burke's premature burial was a decent idea. That being said, the idea that the slight, delicate-looking Sister Irene would be able to dig him up in time was absurd. I suppose you can attribute that to demonic magic or something. Father Burke has a storyline about a boy who died after an exorcism, but it doesn't serve his character development because he doesn't undergo any. None of them do, really, but I don't think the film cared.

The thing that perplexes me most about the film is the casting of Taissa Farmiga as Irene given that she is the younger sister of Vera Farmiga, who plays Lorraine in The Conjuring and its sequel. I was getting the impression that, having already chucked so much of the Warrens' real-life story out the window (such as the fact that they were massive crackpots), they were going to make this the fictionalised backstory of Lorraine and that they'd deliberately cast an actress who looked like Vera Farmiga to set this up. Imagine my surpise when the credits revealed that they'd cast an actual relative as an unrelated character. It turns out that this was simply a coincidence, or perhaps nepotism. It seemed like a wasted opportunity to me, especially because I thought Taissa Farmiga was decent in the role and got the impression she was playing a very similar character to (fictional) Lorraine. I was almost worried Maurice was going to turn out to be Ed somehow, but no, he was just that guy you see in the footage in the first Conjuring, Probably an even more laborious tie-in than the one Annabelle: Creation made to Annabelle the original.

In terms of filmmaking, on a handful of occasions the camera work and lighting did engage me, but at many other times it was flat and empty, completely denuding "scary" scenes of tension. The film in general is too tensionless to be scary; the scariest part, the live burial, happens in the first act of the film. Constantly barraging us with spooky nuns standing ominously in corridors before bursting forth going "Raar!" doesn't add much, nor do the endless shots of people being telekinetically shoved away into the walls. The other issue with engagement is that when Maurice is reintroduced in the third act of the film he is used almost exclusively for comedy, with the result that the film's tone abandons almost any effort at suspense and seems to intentionally embrace being farcical.

However, as I mentioned before, the most purely incompetent element of the film is the editing. At certain points the film smashes back and forth between shots and characters without room for establishment or pacing. An absolutely atrocious moment occurs in which Irene is being informed by the (vision) nun regarding the abbey's history; at one point, when the war is mentioned, the footage smash cuts to a shot of bombs falling on the castle, and a different piece of music suddenly starts blaring out with the hastiest of fade-ins, before smashing back. In the same conversation, the shot holds on Irene's face, cuts to a mid shot of the two at a table, and then a second later smashes back to the close up of Irene; I suspect they had to re-record dialogue and had no usable footage of the other nun actually saying it. A similar bit of awkward cutting happens when Father Burke is relating his unfortunate exorcism of years past, which suggests to me that some of the film's problems come from, surprise surprise (it's Warner Bros.), studio interference insisting upon more exposition and/or padding to bulk out the film and make brainless shitheads pay attention. I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that the material about the Holy Hand Grenade full of Jesus' blood, the portal in the floor and the evil Duke being done in by crusaders was not in the original script. I mean, Jesus' actual blood?

I find the weird Catholic overtones of the film odd, but then again I did in The Conjuring 2 as well. I'm from a nonreligious family and went to a Protestant school, so I have little formal knowledge of Catholicism, and as such all the stuff about nuns taking vows and so on feels a little out of place to me. How come you never see the Anglican church fighting demons? Probably too busy organising church fêtes and pretending that they don't also have a history of systemic child abuse. I also find bringing God into horror films a bit weird because for some reason the problem of evil seems to seem more problematic than ever if God isn't just letting history take its horrible course but is also letting fallen angels wantonly run amok on Earth. That's not really a problem with the film, just something that I always find slightly odd in exorcism-related films. As a comment I read pointed out, if these films operate within a Catholic universe then consecrated red wine ought to work just as well as Jesus' actual blood, incidentally, because theologically they're the same thing. Again, I don't come from a Catholic background so the idea of communion has always seemed incredibly alien to me, but there you go. I don't think McGuffins were something the franchise was crying out for, but now not only are they present but they're going the whole hog. Couldn't it have just been a local saint's blood or something?

Why am I still writing about this? The Nun is bad and I couldn't even honestly recommend it to die-hard The Conjuring completionists like myself. The film has made plenty of money, there's supposedly a third Annabelle in the works and Wan's working on a Conjuring 3 script. Yet while Warner Bros. now knows that they can comfortably use these films to make big returns on small investments, they ought to think of the kind of money they could be making if they actually bothered to invest just a little more to produce the time, creativity and effort to actually make these films good. Well-made films can still be cheap and will generally have a better return than bad films due to positive word of mouth and voluntary publicity. They need to learn from Disney-Marvel that if you really want the big money from a cinematic "universe" then more than half the films in it can't be complete garbage.

Annabelle: Creation

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.