The Conjuring house is having another member as Annabelle Comes Home. As the title suggests the movie takes place after Annabelle, a doll having demonic possession and lead antagonist in previous Annabelle movies, is brought into the possession of the Warrens(Patrick Wilson,Vera Farmiga), one of the protagonists in The Conjuring. The extent of Annabelle’s powers is experienced by The Warrens in the beginning of the film itself when Annabelle summons all the spirits of a cemetery, the one in front of which the Warrens’ car breaks down while returning to their house after picking up Annabelle, and uses them to attack the Warrens.
The main story starts with the Warrens going out for investigating another case as they leave the house and babysitting Judy(Mckenna Grace), their daughter, to Mary Ellen (Madison Iseman). Everything is fine as Judy and Mary bakes the cake for Judy’s birthday, until Daniela Rios (Katie Sarife), a friend of Mary, arrives. She is shown to have a keen interest in the Warrens works as she inquires more on it from Judy. The reason for her arrival is revealed midway in the movie. Daniela is able to make Mary and Judy go out for some time. She then snoops around the house and enters the Warren’s artifacts room. She then releases the spirits and makes the horror setting. Soon all the three girls comes across different spirits, new ones, old ones and our very own Annabelle. By the time Judy and Mary realize what had happened, the spirits have gotten stronger. The rest of the plot revolves around them trying to contain the spirits as they face the spirits.
Like the previous entries the movie has a perfect atmosphere for a jumpscare. Each jumpscare is amplified by the background music. And the fact that the movie keeping the atmosphere as spoofs makes the jumpscare unpredictable.
Mckenna Grace does great job acting as Judy to show her trouble in school, when an article on the Warren’s activities appears on paper, and also showing her starting to follow her parent’s footsteps in demonology when she takes on the spirits to save Mar and Daniela.
But overall the movie fails to create an exceptional impact as it goes down as an average horror movie. We can clearly see that the focus of the movie was on the horror elements. The story was given less importance. The climax to me felt like abrupt and was not satisfying up to some extent.
Most of the action scenes for me was just the protagonists running from spirits to sprits and to Annabelle as they jumpscare them. There was also no big jumpscares although there were many.
Here I do have to say that I hope this trilogy does not turn like the saw trilogy where the gore was given more importance over story and in this case jumpscares.
So in the end, if you want a movie to spook you and you do not mind about the story (the story is not that bad, just that it didn’t feel special and was like all the others out there), then this is the movie to go for. If you are expecting something like The Conjuring, you might be disappointed. If you were ok with The Curse Of La Llorona then this movie’s for you.