Both storylines are more chaotic than coherent. The packed Smurl household is so dense with bodies and horror tropes that it’s an overstuffed Brady Bunch of crosstalk, without real characters to speak of. Judy’s life—from demon-pursued miracle baby, to little girl who’s inherited her mother’s clairvoyance, to ghost-plagued woman engaged to the earnest ex-cop Tony (Ben Hardy)—is predicated on spiritual advice that’s baffling coming from a family whose home has a menagerie of haunted doodads: The things she’s seeing aren’t real. Judy is therefore reduced to horror-movie shorthand, both in her tired arc (of her parents’ overprotective denial giving way to acceptance) and in her chanted nursery rhyme mantra, evoked like a non-denominational prayer to keep the ghosts and ghoulies away.
The Conjuring: Last Rites relies on this recitation like it relies on gags and props from the previous films. These can be more aesthetic repetitions—like another couple of creepy toys, plenty of mirrors, a predictably panning camera, and all the jump-scare monsters seeming to share Bonnie Aarons’ face—or more literal, like the return of the evil doll Annabelle. While skillful horror can exploit audience expectations, a final franchise entry mostly filled with callbacks isn’t especially scary. The more unique elements faced by Ed and Lorraine in Last Rites are the sometimes unintentionally funny demons of age: Terrors like your daughter getting married, your older friends dying, your heart health deteriorating, your ability to move heavy furniture fading, and your likelihood of taking a tumble down the stairs increasing.
The Warrens facing their mortality isn’t exactly the point of Last Rites, but it at least allows for Wilson to charm with a few dad jokes and “I’m too old for this shit”-style asides. But where the rapport between Wilson and Farmiga saw the previous entries through their quieter moments, Last Rites spreads itself too thin for these veterans to explore their earned pathos, the script scattered between Judy and Tony’s infatuation, the rivalry between a pair of Smurl daughters, a sidebar with Steve Coulter’s Father Gordon, and one extended match of ping-pong. When the Warrens finally get to the Smurls’ house, the film rushes to its sepia conclusion for one last round of applause, all but raising Ed and Lorraine’s demonologist jerseys into the rafters.
James Wan’s original Conjuring didn’t reinvent anything for the genre, but deployed perfectly practiced and sweaty-palmed fundamentals in a tense setting, with charmingly dorky leads, punctuated by pops of cleverness in design and dialogue. As those who ran with that film’s legacy watered down their Wan impressions and focused more on beefing up the mythos of the Warrens, the returns diminished and the series evolved into a defiantly uncritical series of God-powered superhero films. Even in Last Rites, where the Warrens’ 1980s lecture audience is mostly there to heckle them about Ghostbusters, this larger cultural eye-roll at the supernatural is just a one-off gag; the rest of the film banks on those “based on the true story” title cards to carry its emotional weight. The damning detail is that this time the silly claim of veracity isn’t trying to add an extra chill, but provide a cheap happily ever after.
Director: Michael Chaves
Writer: Ian Goldberg, Richard Naing, David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick
Starring: Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Mia Tomlinson, Ben Hardy
Release Date: August 15, 2025
