The Conjuring: Last Rites

The Conjuring: Last Rites – 2025
Director Michael Chaves
Screenplay Ian Goldberg, David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick
Starring Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Mia Tomlinson, Ben Hardy

A quick scan at the career of the director Michael Chaves shows the weakest entries in The Conjuring Universe. These include The Curse of La Llarona, The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, and The Nun II. One can add Last Rites to that list. It’s not like the talent behind the series have stopped caring. Instead it feels like they’ve become comfortable in the PG-13 audience they are trying to attract. Rather than challenging the viewer with allusions, they rely on two or three sanitized scares. The visuals don’t really stick in the mind. They also appeal to sentimentality towards the film’s protagonists, The Warrens (Farmiga, Wilson and Tomlinson).

The story starts with a mirror in an antique storeroom where a mirror forced the owner to hang himself. An interview with his daughter leads a pregnant Lorraine to the emergency room, and a nearly stillborn daughter.

Judy survives, but is afflicted with imagery throughout her life. She is now on the verge of marriage. The mirror finds its way to the Smurl family as a gift for a confirmation ceremony.

What happens from here are a series of spooky events, so unremarkable as to get a one line explanation by Judy when she and Ed finally arrive at the house. The real villain is not the ghost of the man who murdered his wife and mother-in-law. It’s actually a demon in the mirror. Okay…

Much of Last Rites covers Ed and Lorraine as comforters of those afflicted. We get that they approach these events as those trying to make the haunted families feel normal as possible. The scene with Ed making pancakes gives more feeling than most of the rest of the film.

If you like PG-13 horror, you will probably accept this “final” Conjuring film. It gives what it is supposed to: lukewarm scares. If you are looking to have a film challenge with an exploration of the border of life, death, good and evil, then you will be disappointed.

(*** out of *****)