Conjuring up another sequel

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This article was published 12/08/2017 (3213 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

So now there’s a Conjuring universe, in case you missed it.

Annabelle: Creation is a sequel to 2014’s Annabelle, which was itself a spinoff of The Conjuring, a haunted-house story based on the paranormal adventures of a pair of Christian ghostbusters.

The whole franchise is distinguished by its above-standard production values and the tendencies of its directors to offer up old-fashioned scares with high-quality state-of-the-art technique.

As the title implies, Annabelle: Creation is the origin story of the creepy girl doll, apparently possessed by a Satanic cultist, last seen terrorizing a young mother in Annabelle.

Somebody had to make that hideous doll. That would be toymaker Sam Mullins (Anthony LaPaglia) who lives in a remote rural home with his wife Esther (Miranda Otto) and their daughter Bee (Samara Lee), before a tragedy befalls the trio.

Twelve years after said tragedy, a whole orphanage of girls moves into the rambling Mullins house, now rendered creepy by the spirit of the departed but paranormally busy Bee. If the girls occasionally get the willies, their guardian Sister Charlotte (Stephanie Sigman) must put them straight: “We’ve got nowhere else to go.”

It’s not long before the doll shows up, tucked away in a mysterious closet lined with pages from the Bible. It seems to have particular designs on the most physically vulnerable of the girls, Janice (Talitha Bateman), who’s mostly lost the use of her legs to polio. It’s Janice’s best friend Linda (Lulu Wilson) who is obliged to rise to the defence of the girls as the malevolent doll-demon in the house gathers strength.

Director David F. Sandberg, who helmed last year’s sleeper-thriller Lights Out, demonstrates his ability to ping the nerves with one sequence after another, rising to two significant crescendoes of terror, one of which involves an entity that puts the “scare” in scarecrow.

Apart from the unintentional shocks of anachronistic dialogue (memo to screenwriter Gary Dauberman: in the 1950s, no one was “freaked out”), the film’s biggest problem is that just about every scene is constructed to terrify on various different gradients of fear, with no real breathing room between shocks.

Also — and this is an issue with the entire Conjuring franchise — the absence of humour makes the tone a little more dour than it needs to be.

That said, the child actors are very good, the spooky-old-house production design is top-notch, and the cinematography is often excellent: a night scene in which Lina tries to throw Annabelle down a well is downright painterly.

If there are no laughs to be had here, one is consoled by a brief moment of unexpected gothic beauty among the relentless scares.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @FreepKing