Hello ... again ... dolly
Annabelle prequel has requisite scares, but is bogged down by murky backstory
Exposition does not, I expect, strike terror in the hearts of many men. Few are aghast to learn the backstory of the homicidal circus-clown, or appalled to discover the benign suburban origins of the notorious criminal mastermind.
When a horror movie gets around to supplying the requisite information about its villain’s provenance or pedigree, it’s simply to satisfy the obligations of the narrative form, not to quench some thirst for macabre biography. There’s a reason our nightmares tend to remain cryptic and indeterminate: Backstory isn’t scary. The children’s doll, meanwhile, has a rather strong claim to our dread.
A minor player in James Wan’s The Conjuring, where she was introduced only briefly but made an indelible impression, Annabelle was accorded top billing in a horror feature of her own in 2014, when it became apparent perhaps that Wan’s particular brand of low-budget ghost story could be enormously profitable in perpetuity. Now the spinoff has yielded a sequel, or rather prequel, and in any case this malevolent 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 the atrocity had somehow bred the evil.
But Annabelle: Creation, as its title 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 much-feared 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 nearconstant 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.
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, so 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 light bulbs with her mind. Why bother as Annabelle at all?
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.