The Smurl family home in “The Conjuring: Last Rites” includes peeling wallpaper in the stairwell, an accidental metaphor for the way the film uses top-shelf acting and production values – along with made-up story points — to wallpaper over a plot that barely exists despite being “based on a true story.”
The fourth and latest “Conjuring” film to seem like it’s the last one, “Last Rites” has juicy potential as it chronicles the haunted house in urban Pennsylvania where a family of eight lives. It was also chronicled in the not-scary 1991 TV movie “The Haunted,” one of those early films to draw from the files of Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) before “The Conjuring” (2013) made them stars. (Posthumously in Ed’s case, and Lorraine enjoyed it till her 2019 death.)
This one is scarier, I’ll give it that much. Director Michael Chaves gave me one of those jump scares that sent a chill of fear through me, and he creates camera angles that make the most of shadowy spaces where a ghost might be hiding, like a 1980s unfinished basement where Janet Smurl (Rebecca Calder) does laundry.
“The Conjuring: Last Rites” (2025)
Director: Michael Chaves
Writers: David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick (screenplay, story), Ian Goldberg (screenplay), Richard Naing (screenplay), James Wan (story)
Stars: Patrick Wilson, Vera Farmiga, Mia Tomlinson
But if there was ever any doubt that the “Conjuring” films are the Warrens’ stories rather than the victims’, “Last Rites” blows that away in the last act. Before that, individual moments suggest a tense family drama among the Smurls. One of the four daughters, Dawn (Beau Gadsdon), confronts her milquetoast dad, Jack (Elliot Cowan), at the dinner table: Are they staying here because he doesn’t believe them and a haunting event hasn’t happened to him personally, or because there’s nothing he can do about it?
Those interested in the Smurl case and “The Haunted” might’ve been interested to see how the ghost-rape of Jack is pulled off. It’s done with creepiness, as Chaves – who has improved as an artist over the course of his four Conjuring Universe films — makes good use of an image in a mirror showing the ghost (whereas it is otherwise invisible), but not with particular violence. This is a rather tame R-rated film.
Crowded house
But at least “Last Rites” is nominally about the Smurls up to that point. After that, it almost entirely becomes the Warrens’ show. This would be valid if it reflected reality, as was more so the case in the third film, but the writers fictionalize this part. They make up a story about daughter Judy (Mia Tomlinson, taking over for Mckenna Grace, who perhaps has star-powered her way out of the saga). When she’s not harassed by the Annabelle doll, she’s haunted by a heavily framed mirror, which she tracks to the Smurl house.
So then it becomes a fictional story about a magic mirror, supplanting the real drama of a family coming apart at the seams because their house is haunted. Or if it’s not haunted, all eight of them eventually think it is, and that’s dramatic too. Or if all eight are lying, that’s still compelling. Even if the writers wanted to stick with the Smurls’ and Warrens’ position that the house is haunted, there’s drama to be found in media hounding and financial pressure – issues touched upon but underexplored in “The Haunted.”
The writers choose to focus on Judy – in her 20s in 1986 here, whereas she was about 40 in real life — and a haunted mirror. Granted, this is a better haunted-mirror movie than “Amityville: A New Generation” (1993) – part of a saga also connected to the Warrens – but it’s not drawn from the Smurls’ situation.
(SPOILERS FOLLOW.) Furthermore, the writers use the ultimate in wallpapering to explain what’s going on. Lorraine says something about how there were domestic murders on this site back when it was farmland, the ghosts aren’t at rest, and a demon is using the ghosts. Even with Farmiga delivering the lines, I almost snorted out loud. Even with her established clairvoyant powers, how is it that one vision gives Lorraine such complete details? (END OF SPOILERS.)
I’ve ripped “Last Rites” pretty thoroughly for a movie I’m actually recommending. If you don’t give a darn about the reality of the Smurl haunting, you’ll have a good, scary time. As soon as you start thinking of the documented events, though, the self-promotion by the late Warrens’ estate and handlers becomes as overwhelming as that crowded house.