Spirited sequel sustains chill factor
The Conjuring 2 (15) Verdict: Hair-raising ★★★✩✩
A DEMON nun and a furious poltergeist rub shoulders with The Clash in James Wan’s intermittently chilling horror movie based on the true story (insofar as any ghost story can be described as true) of The Enfield Haunting, which caused quite a stir in North London back in the late Seventies.
Wan also made The Conjuring (2013), which became one of the top ten highest-grossing horror films of all time, and this is a decent follow-up, again featuring Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga as crucifixwaving American ghostbusters Ed and Lorraine Warren.
But the Warrens are a sideshow this time. The main protagonists are the impoverished Hodgson family: mum Peggy and children Margaret, Janet, Johnny and Billy, all living in a run-down council house in Enfield in 1977. Whether they have a relative named Roy, haunted by an inability to win penalty shoot-outs, is not disclosed.
Wan and his ( American) screenwriters work hard to evoke place and period, and let’s forgive them the anachronistic use of The Clash’s London Calling (1979).
Frances O’Connor plays hardpressed single mum Peggy, whose 11-year-old daughter Janet (Madison Wolfe) unwittingly and, at times, downright terrifyingly becomes the conduit for the rage of an elderly man, Bill Wilkins, who had died in the house decades ear- lier. Wan expertly keeps the horror and suspense in harness, and even treats us to a few sparks of humour, as when a policewoman, who has just witnessed the poltergeist doing its thing, nervously concludes that ‘I think this is a bit beyond us’.
I was a bit confused by the demon nun, who arrives with the Warrens as they fly over from the States to exorcise the house, but she certainly adds another few layers of dread.
So it is a welcome distraction to see Simon McBurney seemingly invoking Lord Sugar as his model for paranormal investigator Maurice Grosse (who died in 2006, incidentally, though not before suing comedian David Baddiel for writing a novel with a storyline about an adulterer called Maurice Grosse).