The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (2021)

Warning: I still can’t stand the Conjuring series!

After hapless paranormal investigators Ed (Patrick Wilson, or his reanimated corpse, given his even more complete lack of expression this time around) and Lorraine Warren (Vera Farmiga, as typical for this series putting more effort in than anybody else involved in the project, and getting nothing for it) cock up another investigation, a young man catches demon and kills his boss/friend while possessed. The idiot couple convinces the guy’s lawyer to go with the old “my client’s innocent on account of demonic possession” defence and proceed to find out what’s actually going on in the case – which they might have done before they attempted an exorcism, which might have made this a movie not based on its protagonists being really bad at their job. Hilarity ensues.

The third entry into the The Conjuringverse’s main series still has man of the problems that made its predecessors so badly to digest for me: there’s – obviously, inevitably – the series’ use of right-wing Christian scam artists as if they were cuddly heroes; a really boring mythology based on the worst US-style Evangelical Christianity has to offer; a general lack of weirdness, ambiguity, or just plain craziness, the series not only being ideologically conservative but also in its approach to the supernatural. To be fair, TDMMDI, as directed by Michael Chaves, does lose at least one central weakness of its predecessors, their total dependency on Big Set Pieces™ and jump scares.

Given that our protagonists are supposed to be crack psychic detectives, the decision to replace much of the loud bits of the earlier movies by showing them committing to an actual investigation makes a lot of sense, too. Unfortunately, nobody of the half a dozen or so people credited with the script seems to have much of a clue of how to write investigative horror. So more than half of the film consists of the Warrens going through one of the slowest and most boring investigations in the history of fictional occult detectives, intercut with scenes of the travails of our main possession victim (Ruairi O’Connor, playing a guy without any character traits perfectly) so that at least some mild spooky stuff happens. Said spooky stuff consists of some random, tired and badly timed horror bits, Chaves showing little flair for the genre.

Ironically, this move away from the series standards actually gives me a whole new appreciation for the comparative care (perhaps even artfulness) the earlier movies in the franchise take with their set pieces and jump scares, and the creators’ willingness to at least entertain their audience. The film at hand is about as entertaining as watching paint dry. To add even further irony – and as a good example of its generally shoddy writing – the film isn’t even good as an example of the kind of Christian religious horror whose rhetoric it espouses: after all, it’s not any power invested by God into a deserving individual (say a priest) or simply the Sweet Baby Jesus who saves the day against the film’s underused antagonist (who is just as wasted as is the great John “I’m only in it for the exposition” Noble), it’s the rather more worldly love between couples and a big damn sledgehammer. Which my secular person does find rather more sympathetic – if only the script had actually prepared this as a thematic element before it used it, or had shown anything of it as part of its background lore. Not even one “Also, demons are allergic to love” comes from Noble.

I really do appreciate that the series attempts to go into somewhat new directions with this, but there’s so little of import or interest happening in this version of investigative horror, it might as well not have bothered. But hey, the title makes clear it’s not the filmmakers who are to blame, so there’s that.