THE CONJURING (2013)

Director James Wan is rapidly becoming Hollywood’s go-to man for superior supernatural fright flicks. Sandwiched in between the genuinely creepy INSIDIOUS - and the eagerly awaited sequel INSIDIOUS: CHAPTER 2 - we have THE CONJURING, a film which delivers such a proficient stream of jolt shocks you could strap it to Baron Frankenstein’s monster and bring it to life.

Based on the case files of the real-life married demonologists / paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga), the film gives us an interpretation of the alleged events which occurred when the Warren’s were called upon to help the Perron family (mum and dad played by Ron Livingston and Lili Taylor) who encounter ‘bumps in the night’ on an increasingly threatening scale in their secluded farmhouse in the 1970’s.

Once again Wan demonstrates his clinical affinity for staging spooky set-pieces and he pulls off some genuine spine-tingling moments and real jump-out-of-your-seat scares. In this he is aided considerably by a sound mix which infuses proceedings with an insistent dread and then cranks the ‘boo!’ cues up to ‘11’ on the volume dial.  Director of photography John Leonetti (INSIDIOUS) provides a crisp widescreen canvas in which to judiciously cloak the screen in the kind of primal darkness where you just know that lighting a match or flicking on a torch will suddenly reveal something unholy.

Despite the almost relentless barrage of bangs, crashes, self-slamming doors and worse...the cast hold their own and present us with credible and, most importantly, sympathetic characters. And when the you-know-what really begins to hit the fan in the film’s final third, the impact of these scenes is helped immeasurably by the performances of Wilson, Farmiga and Lili Taylor who throw themselves heart and soul into the maelstrom of events. 

It has to be said that the film does at times have a feel of being a slick, efficient compendium of the ‘Greatest Moments from Previous Supernatural Films’. (For spoiler reasons I can’t go into detail here but trust me, if you were to go into the cinema with a pencil and a checklist of spooky clichés to mark off, you’ll have ticked practically every box by the time the end credits roll - assuming your pencil hasn’t flown out of your hand during one of these actual moments that is).

But Wan pulls these off with great assurance, and there are some unique touches in there too, so by the time the house lights come back up you won’t feel cheated by the quota of quality ‘boo!’ moments for your money.

****(out of 5*)

Paul Worts