Scary, with spice

Latest Annabelle does its best to revive franchise

Annabelle Comes Home

★★★ 1/2 out of 5

Cast: Madison Iseman, Mckenna Grace, Katie Sarife

Director: Gary Dauberman

Duration: 1 h 46 m The Conjuring Universe — it still pains me to use this bizarre expression for a loosely linked series of horror films — has been suffering a little of late. By which I mean it hasn’t been suffering enough. The cardinal sin that was 2018’s The Nun raked in more than $100 million at the box office, while this year’s equally egregious The Curse of La Llorona managed $54 million. Those are some unholy numbers.

But Annabelle Comes Home, as the title suggests, represents a welcome return to form for the franchise. You’ll recall (or not; doesn’t matter) that Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga played married paranormal investigators in several Conjuring movies. This one opens with them transporting the soul-sucking Annabelle doll back to their New England home, where it’s exorcised, blessed, encased in a cabinet made of church glass labelled WARNING: DEFINITELY DO NOT OPEN, and then triple-locked in a room with even more caution signs.

You’ll never guess what the babysitter does.

OK, to be fair, the deed isn’t the fault of sitter Mary Ellen (Madison Iseman) but rather her pal Daniela (Katie Sarife), who invites herself over on the night Mary Ellen is looking after 10-year-old Judy (Mckenna Grace). And while the audience may groan at Daniela’s wilful stupidity, there’s a later scene that provides at least a partial explanation for her misdeed.

That kind of attention to narrative detail is one of the things that sets this apart from lesser horror movies. Another is its confidence in allowing a humorous subplot (baby-faced Michael Cimino plays a lovestruck cashier) to co-exist with its darker moments, of which there are plenty.

Not that there aren’t a few missteps along the way. I’ve lost track of how many movies give one character an inhaler, which then gets misplaced, followed by an asthma attack at the worst possible moment. You could also argue that it’s just bad parenting to have a room of possessed objects in your house, even if they are blessed once a week. It’s a bit like keeping lions and arguing: “But they’re fed regularly!”

But the good outweighs the bad under first-time director Gary Dauberman, who also wrote the screenplay for The Nun, It and all the Annabelles. He’s got a thing for the slow build toward quiet dread — there were scenes where all I could hear was one character breathing, and this audience member trying not to. And in this age of Ouija, Clue and Battleship, who knew that the most frightening diversion in a movie would be a copy of Feeley Meeley, a Milton Bradley game from 1967?

That’s in keeping with the film’s early ’70s setting, which matches up with the convoluted timeline of the other Annabelle movies, and also harks back to the first wave of babysitter-in-peril films; Halloween, Amityville, When a Stranger Calls, etc.

Annabelle isn’t quite certain how to wrap up its story after turning into a slightly scarier version of Goosebumps, which was a 2015 family-friendly frightener in which a library’s worth of demons is set free. (When they ask Daniela what she touched in the forbidden room, her breathless reply is: “Everything.”) It settles for a rather calm winding-down that may annoy the more hardcore horror fans.

But for this dilettante, it has renewed my faith in the series. And with at least three more movies planned, the franchise needs all the goodwill it can muster.