SHE’S BAAAACK

THE MALEVOLENT LIGNEOUS MOPPET OF MERELY NEGLIGIBLE INTEREST RETURNS

moppet of merely negligible interest is back once again.

Annabelle’s previous screen adventure was an origin story that told of how the nefarious doll came to be. Or anyway one supposed as much: the film began with a ritual Manson-like murder in the late 1960s and it seemed reasonable to presume that the atrocity somehow bred the evil. But Annabelle: Creation, as its title inauspiciously suggests, whisks us back a quarter of a decade earlier, revealing through a wearisome combination of expository episodes, mid-film flashbacks, and ill-timed soliloquies precisely how, why and by whom the muchfeared toy was fashioned, as well as the complicated circumstances by which it came to want to murder people — though even then only sort of. Hauntings, possessions and curses of various kind abound. It’s explained at a brisk and near-constant clip and yet I’m still not quite clear on what it means or has to do with anything.

The action concerns a beguiled coterie of adolescent orphans who descend upon the home of a certain Samuel and Esther Mullins (Anthony LaPaglia and Miranda Otto), where, for reasons hardly worth recounting, a vague demonic presence lurks within the body of a Raggedy Ann. This is of course our Annabelle, and the young orphans are of course terrorized by her — though as Annabelle seems capable of opening and closing doors, controlling the environment at will, and manifesting in a wide variety of more mobile and powerful forms, why she elects to remain inside a not especially useful doll and while away her time spooking people instead of killing them continues to be a mystery. At one point she transforms into a full-grown ambulatory nun and at another becomes a sentient scarecrow. She can hurl adults through the air without touching them and unscrew lightbulbs with her mind. Why bother as Annabelle at all?

Of course a horror movie is under no obligation to rationalize its fancies. Given a choice between having an evil scarecrow in your film and not having one, you had damn well better throw one in, whether or not logic accommodates it. I maintain it is no coincidence Annabelle: Creation is at its most luridly entertaining when it feels freest to indulge its sinister whims: when dragging half a reanimated corpse up a dumbwaiter shaft, for instance, or when tormenting a defenceless little girl (crippled by polio, naturally) stuck on an electric stairlift. Director David F. Sandberg, has a great deal of fun establishing several RubeGoldberg devices around his haunted house in the first act and putting them to outrageous use by the end of the third.

These pleasures, as you might expect, do not have very much at all to do with Annabelle — even less with her Creation. And indeed Sandberg often seems an artist bored by his own material, resigned to doodling in the margins. The underlying tension between duty and invention poses two questions. The first is why a perfectly self-contained and relatively intriguing horror movie about a haunted all-girls orphanage has been burdened with a name brand and all the franchise baggage that attends it. (Does the prequel to a spinoff really promise to be more lucrative than an original film?) The second is whether anybody is interested in the origin story Annabelle: Creation professes to reveal. Did the world truly need to learn more about whence an evil doll came? Did any audience demand this history? We should have kept things cryptic and indeterminate. Backstory isn’t scary. Ω∂½ The Annabelle doll in New Line Cinema’s supernatural thriller Annabelle: Creation.