Annabelle: Comes Home - a review

Ed and Lorraine Warren bring the Annabelle doll home. There their daughter Judy, her  babysitter Mary and the babysitter’s friend Daniela are in for a night of terror as they are home alone and Annabelle escapes her glass cage. Annabelle has her mind set once again on playing her demonic games.

Annabelle is back. With more of the same spooks and scares as before. Some effective, some not. But, as a refreshment it does have, a lovely little love-story that I certainly didn’t want to end badly.

But yes, the synopsis I wrote above is the story; there’s not much more to it. The story is kept minimal just so the movie can indulge in the thrill ride it promises. Ed and Lorraine leave on business. The three girls have a quick ‘get to know them’ scene and then the show can get underway.

This is a big leap from the previous instalments (even) in the entirety of the Conjuring-franchise because, this time around there isn’t a mystery to be solved along the way. No; Annabelle is out, fight the demons and get the doll the hell back into her glass cage!

Another change is the Warren’s daughter Judy. She is now played by Mckenna Grace taking over the reins from (a job well done by) Sterling Jerins.

A lovely young actress who plays the ‘creepy kid’-part perfectly fine.

I still think the haunting of Hill House-series she was in was quite awful.

I don’t understand the hype, and I won’t let a chance pass to say it.

The Warrens’ house.

As I often said before, horror has a great deal to do with the usage of space and place. You need a haunted house or room for starters (place). What’s there lurking in the shadows just beyond your field of vision (space)? Why do both the Shining and Halloween keep on reducing safe and wide places to small unsafe spaces the minute tension rises?

Which also happens in this movie near the end.

It a simple technique to increase the terror. As the phrase goes: ’your back is against the wall’.

One, often overlooked, technique is informing the audience of a space. For example Danny and Wendy Torrance’s trek through the Overlook maze in the Shining. This very simple scene informs the audience that Danny now knows the path through the maze. Something the movie later effectively uses for the finale.

In Annabelle: Comes Home there is, however, a card up the sleeve. One shouldn’t look at Annabelle: Comes Home as a standalone movie; but as part of the whole of the Conjuring-franchise. If you do that, you (the viewer) by now knows your way through the Warrens’ house since you’ve been there so many times before.

On a narrative level the same goes for the explanation. The audience doesn’t need to know ‘what’s wrong with Annabelle’ anymore. If you want to know that? Watch part 2. All we need to be remembered of is that Annabelle is one vindictive dolly.

Familiar versus New

But; this is the duality of Annabelle: Comes Home. The movie both demands you to have seen the previous instalments but it also springs a whole bunch of well-known tropes upon you. Not only tropes of horror-movies of yesteryears, mind you,

In our current Tarantino decade(s) in which movies love to keep on referring to ‘the classics’.

But also the same kind of tricks pulled in the previous Conjuring-movies (e.g. rocking chairs, slamming doors, possessed children-playthings and disappearing people/dolls).

The question then becomes –much like the cake the three main leads bake early in the movie- when is it a proper mixture of well known ingredients combined with new ones and when are we talking about ‘that same old cake’?

Let’s just say that I am biased. I love ‘the Conjuring cake’ but even I sometimes prefer a different flavour. To stay with this metaphor of cake,  Annabelle: Comes Home only mixes a few ingredients around. It’s tasty, great, but not spectacularly new tasting in any way. But the movie does bring one massive cake to the table. Volume over taste as it were.  After the introductions Annabelle: Comes Home is a full hour of constant, never-ending, spooks and scares. Which is what I bought the ticket for.

Spooks and scares.

If you have a conduit doll to the darker side of the afterlife locked in a glass case with a big bleeding sign that says: ‘Do not open this case! DANGER!’  There’s quite a challenge for a filmmaker to ‘get that door open’.

The character Daniela (Katie Sarife) gets this ambiguous honour. And even though the movie tries (rather successfully) to explain her motivation; in the end she still remains that ‘one character who can’t read!’.

Still, that’s my only big critique on the movie. Once the door has been opened and Annabelle gets to play the limited story is immediately forgiven. As the movie then takes the well-trodden path of combining character-development with terror.

Because the movie takes so much time out to bombard the viewer with scare-scenes there will be some of the abovementioned ‘familiar’ versus ‘new’ dynamic. Some of these spooks and scares work (the piano scene, ‘can Annabelle come to play?’), some don’t (Annabelle popping up all over the place). Just as some are original (the television) and some you see coming for miles (white dress).

A smart move the movie makes is linking the various Warrens’ cases to specific characters.

You just know this-or-that will haunt that character later on.

But, as the movie goes on your investment in the characters increases. Daniela’s motivations gets deepened out a bit more. Mary (Madison Iseman) gets herself a love story that I (as a downright romantic) really wanted to see come to fruition. And the child Judy’s storyline is actually interesting in a ‘kid with famous parents’ kind of way.

But, then again, we are watching a horror-movie.
It could just as easily go the way of Alien versus Predator 2 or Ouija 2.

To quote a friend who I was sitting next to in the cinema watching Alien versus Predator 2:

“Ah, those two will probably end up together”

*Girl gets pinned to the wall by some Predator-knife-frisbee*

“Or, maybe not…”

So, after the introductions, you are rooting for the heroes all the way through.

Visuals

Visually there are quite some clever shots hidden in Annabelle: Comes Home. As is a giving in ghost-movies Annabelle: Comes Home is riddled with Dutch angles, low and high shots, unexpected camera positions and excellent use of framing and blurring the background.

I, for one, especially enjoyed the usage of light and colour in the final half of the movie. It pretty much starts with the ‘rotating seventies lamp’. Which brings a nice break from the dark shadows and streaks of light. Not to mention that it’s a good thing to, finally, have a horror movie it pitch black darkness again that doesn’t solely rely on things jumping out of the shadows.

The creature design, however, I’m a bit on two-minds about. But, luckily, there was enough shadow to hide the latex.

Annabelle is back in her cage.

Overall I rather enjoyed this third instalment of the Annabelle-franchise. It is solid as long as you don’t get too bogged down on the ‘seen that before’-road. If you accept that Annabelle: Comes Home is a perfect instalment in the ongoing franchise in which the Warrens fight the nether realm.