Audiovisually, The Conjuring is the Four Seasons Hotel of horror films. That is a compliment. Every moment of this 112-minute ghost story invites you to luxuriate in it. Every shot is rich, layered and inviting; each zoom and pan seems to have been calibrated and honed just so. The production design is nothing short of a wonder, and the bumps and creaks on the soundtrack are arranged so precisely that I can only imagine the superhuman effort this required. The movie confirms James Wan as one of our greatest classical genre stylists: he directs his gorgeous, graceful films as if composing a symphony.
And yet The Conjuring is my least favorite of Wan’s films since he made his first big splash with the goofy and budget-constrained Saw. The ghost story it tells is ultimately so familiar – so paint-by-numbers down to the little girl’s invisible friend and the exorcism with Latin shouting – that it never feels truly dangerous. Forty-five minutes in, I was so confident that the movie would not offer any real surprises that I relaxed my grip on my armrests and turned to admiring the sound design and camerawork.
Don’t get me wrong — the film has eeriness to spare. Wan knows better than almost anyone on the market how to orchestrate a good jump, and how to make you want very badly to look away from the screen as you wait for something to appear in a mirror or to peek out of the darkness. It helps that the haunted house in which the “true” events of the film take place is such a marvelous set, rustic in a way prosaic enough to be believable. There is (of course) a secret cellar, and I loved how it’s dilapidated and cobwebby enough to be creepy, but not so done-up as to look like the obvious trope that it is. And there is (of course!) an ominous half-broken music box that could have been just an arbitrary horror movie object but is instead something beautiful, tactile, with its faded paint and rusty hinges. It’s this sort of painstaking attention to detail that sets Wan’s films apart.
And so I appreciated these things, and my spine duly tingled. But on a screenplay level, The Conjuring is a little too rote to approach the sort of holy-shit-I-want-to-leave terror and dread that made Wan’s Insidious such a singular roller coaster ride. There’s an unfortunate sense of going through the motions — here’s an old piano; there’s a dark closet; oh the pictures fell off the wall; how ’bout an exorcism — and though the gears may be gorgeous, it’s a problem that you can see them turning. As the film tells its vague, bare-bones story of vengeful ghosts and demonic possession, it starts to feel like nothing is really at stake. These are just random movie demons terrorizing some characters put there to be terrorized.
The Conjuring is only the second film Wan has made without the collaboration of his writing partner Leigh Whanell, though it still indulges in their joint obsession with spirals and creepy puppets. It feels very much like Wan did his level best with a script that didn’t have a ton going for it. In the hands of your average hack, it would have been a generic bore. In Wan’s, it’s a hollow thing of beauty.
