15 June 2016

SHE STILL INSISTS SHE SEES THE GHOSTS

The Conjuring 2 is a proper old-school sequel. It doesn't retroactively turn The Conjuring into the first movement of a long-form narrative; it doesn't really mention the events of The Conjuring at all, outside of a couple quick visual allusions. It just takes the same heroes, married paranormal investigators Ed (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine Warren (Vera Farmiga), and sets them loose on another adventure. It's a tactic that used to simply be the way sequels got done, and is somewhat out of fashion these days, but it has its advantages. One of those is that the film doesn't need to try so hard: it can just be a nice little self-contained object that's perfectly enjoyable on its own right, and hopefully it doesn't simply re-create the entire content of the first film over again.

It's in no small part for this exact reason that The Conjuring 2 proves to be such a damned good sequel. It is not, I think, as scary as The Conjuring, and it's certainly not as clean (the screenplay, by Carey Hayes & Chad Hayes & James Wan - also the director - and David Johnson, is indulgent in exactly the ways that happen when a filmmaking team is given all the leeway in the world based on their last success, and so can afford to be undisciplined), but it might actually be better than its predecessor. At least, it tells a richer story that uses its characters to better effect. Also, the fact that word like "story" and "character" can be tossed around blithely in regards to a horror sequel about a poltergeist is by itself enough to demonstrate that there is something awfully special about these Conjuring pictures. They are full of the usual bump 'n jump nonsense of every ghost movie since time immemorial, but they have the audacity to anchor the typical gamut of haunted house clichés in genuinely involving character drama, executed by legitimately talented actors.

You wouldn't necessarily expect that from the start, when the film makes its most dubious choice: we reacquaint ourselves with the Warrens, many years after the end of The Conjuring, as they're investigating the alleged haunting that would catapult them to national prominence. Right at the very start, in fact, there's a shot inside the attic room of a house with a distinctive gambrel roof, and extremely distinctive half-moon windows. Yessir, we're in Amityville, New York, and Wan and company have decided the best opening gesture for their film is to reiterate the stuff and nonsense of The Amityville Horror, a story that has been subject to all the cinematic abuse it can withstand, I should have to think. The flipside is that it doesn't take much at all to be the best treatment of the material that we've seen: Lorraine, attempting to use her psychic powers to determine whether the claim that the house is possessed is bullshit or not, has a vision where she occupies the body of Ronnie DeFeo as he skulks through the house, murdering his parents and siblings with a shotgun. It's entirely unnecessary to put any of this in the film, but since it's here anyway, I'm glad it's so well done: the actual killings are done as violent jump-cuts, with Farmiga staring helpless and horrified as she pantomimes cocking and firing the gun.

The Amityville material does do one thing for the film, though it's probably the most troubling part of the whole production. Compared to the first Conjuring, the sequel is much more "about" the Warrens and their work, and there's a level on which the plot involves them working out their feelings about being prominent experts on ghost hunting and demonology in the face of a skeptical world. Put bluntly, it's hagiography, and the subjects upon which it lavishes praise are a pair of slimy con-artists of the first order. The first movie never grapples so directly with the fact of the Warrens' career that it becomes an issue; the second movie foregrounds this, and puts in multiple scenes - the Amityville prologue among them - that are the next best thing to outright apologetics for the Warrens.

Ah well. Movies aren't journalism, they're movies, and The Conjuring 2 is a really damn good one. In Amityville, Lorraine has a terrifying vision of a demonic nun (Bonnie Aarons), who is all the stuff that Wan finds terrifying: old ladies dressed in black with craggy skin, predatory eyes, and a mouth like a vagina dentata. She also has a vision of Ed dying horribly. These are enough to put her off the ghost-hunting game entirely, to Ed's confused acceptance. Meanwhile, in Enfield, in the north of London, a haunting is warming up: Peggy Hodgson (Frances O'Connor), a recent divorcée with four children, is barely able to keep her family from imploding due to poverty and the shitty, ancient council housing they're obliged to live in. The stress is affecting all her kids, but it's mostly taking its toll on her younger daughter Janet (Madison Wolfe), who is starting to sleepwalk, or something - she keeps waking up at the foot of an old leather easy chair on the floor below the bedrooms - and who has half-seen visions of an angry old man (Bob Adrian). At first, this is all merely one more annoyance in a life of them, but pretty soon furniture is moving on its own, children are levitating, and Janet is speaking in the ragged voice of a male senior citizen. Peggy is encouraged to go to the media with her story, and in no time at all, the Hodgson family haunting has become a huge story, attracting attention from paranormal experts Maurice Grosse (Simon McBurney), who sees here a chance to prove the existence of life after death, and Anita Gregory (Franka Potente), who smells a hoax; the Catholic Church ends up getting involved, but before they're willing to intercede, they want some expert eyes of their own to check things out and verify that this isn't just a publicity stunt. Those experts, naturally, turn out to be the Warrens themselves, over Lorraine's misgivings. They head over the week before Christmas, which turns out to be used exactly right to plug some ironic holiday iconography in without battering us over the head with it.

The appeal of The Conjuring 2, much like the appeal of The Conjuring, lies in having the old tunes played well, not in seeing anything surprising or unexpected. But oh, golly, how well it's played. As a ghost story, it's marvelously well-constructed to produce an increasing sense of distress and unease rather than to actually scare us, though Wan still knows how to place a jump scare particularly well, as the punctuation mark to a long stretched-out moment of nervous waiting. Still, one of the neatest tricks The Conjuring 2 plays is to give us an expanded view, not a contracted one, which makes such jump scares harder. Wan and cinematographer Don Burgess use an awful lot of long takes with the camera sliding back and forth, left and right, around corners and behind doors; it's almost invariably yoked to a character's perspective, but instead of leaving lots of hidey-holes for demons to jump out of, it tends to emphasise contiguous spaces and big rooms. It makes emptiness more terrifying than things jumping out of the dark. And it works enormously well - one of the film's best moments comes when the youngest Hodgson child, Billy (Benjamin Haigh), roles a toy firetruck into the dark space of a tent he has set up in the hallway; we already know that a dark force is going to role the truck back, since we've seen it happen, so Wan and Burgess frame the shot so that we see the end of the hall with the tent and Billy hiding around the corner simultaneously. The tension comes because we know exactly what's going to happen, and it's the uncomfortable duration of it not happening that's nerve-jangling. The whole movie is full of that: gestures that use the fact that we know we're watching a horror movie as a tool against us. It's really quite wonderful.

Still and all, while The Conjuring 2 is a solid ghost story, it's a great story about Ed and Lorraine Warren - the movie characters, at least, if not the real-life charlatans. It's a marital drama, secretly, and a story of people relying on faith - this is the most Catholic horror movie in ages, maybe even since The Exorcist, and as a non-Catholic that might leave me chilly, except the film takes such great care to make religion an irreducible part of the characters' identities and arcs. One does not walk into big summer movies anticipating a moving study of people who are very afraid, but force themselves to do good and be good, since goodness is key to the faith that helps them swallow back that fear, a thoughtful and nuanced take on belief for any movie; one doubly doesn't expect to see this in a film with a "2" in its title and ghosts blowing up light bulbs in its plot description. But it gives a lot for the actors to work with, and Farmiga, in particular, runs with it all the way to the end zone: I already liked her a lot in The Conjuring already, and she's even better here, subtly exploring the doubts and fears and fortitude of her character in a way that would do any film proud, and is downright miraculous for a horror movie.

In truth, the film commits a lot of unnecessary mistakes: it's clearly too long, for one thing, at a generous 134 minutes (22 more than The Conjuring), time not well spent on the Amityville material or the Warrens' appearance on TV chat show, and it takes entirely too much time for the Warrens to get to England, especially given that all the best character material takes place there. The Hodgsons aren't as the Perrons from the last film: Peggy is likable but we don't learn much about her other than "tired-out single mom", and Janet is mostly just the wide-eyed innocent victim. Meanwhile, while big sister Margaret (Lauren Esposito) and Billy get some material to flesh them out, brother Johnny (Patrick McAuley) is a complete non-entity. And the dialogue suggests a bunch of Americans whose sense of the way English people talk and act is, let's be kind and say "unsophisticated". There's also yet another climax that's functionally identical to every other Wan-derived "fight the demon" movie, and they're starting to reach "aerial battles over cities in Marvel films" levels of trite predictability.

Still, there's way more to love than otherwise: the characters, the fun-house quality of the scares, the smart production design and costumes, which build a completely lived-in version of 1977 that never upstages the action (props, as well, to whoever hid foreshadowing detail about the demon into the sets for the Warrens' house - I saw the random letters, I thought they were odd, and then when it was revealed what they spelled out, it was an "a-HA" moment of the best, most shivery kind). It's a fine and empathetic human story that happens to be told in the horror genre, where such stories aren't typically told; that's really cool, and the fact that it's damn good horror movie on top of it just makes it so much the better.

8/10
(and if it holds up at all to a second viewing, I can imagine it creeping over the border to a 9)

4 comments:

  1. Juuuust got out of seeing this. The audience was really into it. Like, talking to the screen, clapping at the heroic moments, all that kind of stuff. Maybe not the ideal theatrical experience (for one, lots of phone-checking and little lights popping up throughout the theater), but you know, I was kind of impressed that a horror movie sequel could do that and not any of the more expensive things to come out this year.

    All told, a lot of fun. I liked that the vast majority of it was about putting knots in your stomach than making 'Boo!' moments (though there were some good ones, for certain). I especially liked *SPOILER ALERT* while recording the conversation with Janet, and having her all out-of-focus, but slowly, the more her voice changes, we can see the little blur on her face turning into something... not quite her. *END SPOILER ALERT*

    I get the feeling that James Wan is becoming something of a modern-day Wes Craven, making classic (or I guess, future classic) horror movies while bottoming out pretty badly in the gaps between (though I guess in Saw's case, he bottomed out while making a classic, if it can be called that). But damn, he's got as many decent-or-better movies right now as terrible*, so who knows? He might end up a little more estimable in the long run.

    On the subject of mixed-bag filmmakers - and I don't know why I feel duty-bound to keep talking about this director of all directors in these comments, given my own ambivalence, but here we go - the new De Palma documentary is out, and I saw it: a mostly fine clipshow of his movies/commentary (it's weird that, even for some of the stuff that I dislike, e.g. The Untouchables, scenes from it played really well on the big screen) though I don't know if I would recommend anyone see it without having seen some of the bigger pieces of the puzzle.

    On the other hand, some of my friends who had absolutely no familiarity with his stuff still found it fascinating, even at the late hour we were watching it. I don't know if I'd call it essential, but it's been swimming in my head a little bit, and there's some good asides mixed in with the overall tone of weariness towards the business.

    *To be fair, I haven't seen Dead Silence or Death Sentence yet, so I should probably hold my tongue about how bad Wan can get.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Without going into spoiler territory, were there any moments from this that equaled or approximated the wardrobe or the "Look what she made me do" moments from the first film?

    ReplyDelete
  3. There are different moments, I'd say. Nothing at all like the wardrobe scene, but there are at least two places where it's doing something akin to "look what she made me do!" in terms of a slow-burn sense of dread in wide shot punctuated by a jump scare in close-up.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Tim - I'm applying for an admin job at an animation house (ARC prodcutions, if anyone cares). Can you please write something in animation-nerd-ese that would express to my prospective employers that I know everything about animation and would fit right in there? Danke.

    ReplyDelete

Just a few rules so that everybody can have fun: ad hominem attacks on the blogger are fair; ad hominem attacks on other commenters will be deleted. And I will absolutely not stand for anything that is, in my judgment, demeaning, insulting or hateful to any gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or religion. And though I won't insist on keeping politics out, let's think long and hard before we say anything particularly inflammatory.

Also, sorry about the whole "must be a registered user" thing, but I do deeply hate to get spam, and I refuse to take on the totalitarian mantle of moderating comments, and I am much too lazy to try to migrate over to a better comments system than the one that comes pre-loaded with Blogger.