'Last Rites' Review: 'The Conjuring' Calls It Quits While It's Still Ahead

The "final" chapter of what's become Hollywood's only unmitigated post-'Avengers' cinematic universe success story goes out on a note high enough to see heaven.

The Conjuring: Last Rites

2025/135 minutes/$55 million/rated R for “bloody/violent content and terror”
Directed by Michael Chaves
Written by Ian Goldberg, Richard Naing and David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick
Story by David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick and James Wan
Produced by James Wan and Peter Safran
Starring Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Mia Tomlinson, Ben Hardy, Elliot Cowan, Kila Lord Cassidy, Beau Gadson, Molly Cartwright, Tilly Walker, Peter Wight, Kate Fahy, John Brotherton, Shannon Kook and Rebecca Calder
Cinematography by Eli Born
Music by Benjamin Wallfisch
Edited by Gregory Plotkin and Elliot Greenberg
Production companies - New Line Cinema, Atomic Monster and The Safran Company
Opening theatrically the week of September 5, courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

Time will tell if The Conjuring: Last Rites is the final chapter in New Line’s nearly-$2.4 billion-grossing (plus whatever this $55 million-budgeted entry earns) cinematic universe. For now, this fourth chapter in the “mothership” series and ninth overall installment (tenth if you count The Curse of La Llorona) indeed asserts itself as a series finale both in terms of marketing and the film as it exists. The tagline is “The case that ended it all!” and the film offers a ‘We’re retired, but… one last adventure!’ structure, a supernatural mystery that loosely connects to our heroes’ earliest outings and a melodrama that flirts with being a passing-the-torch legacy sequel**. And the picture is as much about the “not getting any younger” Ed and Lorraine Warren taking stock of their professional and personal legacies as it is about saving a family from a haunted house.

This Michael Chaves-directed outing understands that we show up to these flicks as much to watch Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga wholesomely obsess over each other and emotionally heal the latest imperiled family, Touched by an Angel-style, as to observe the spooky set pieces and periodic jump scares. As such, the 135-minute flick rightfully spends its first 2/3 as a borderline midlife crisis dramedy. Set in 1986, Lorraine is worried that her now-adult daughter, Mia Tomlinson (the third actress — following Sterling Jerins in the first three Conjuring films and McKenna Grace in Annabelle Comes Home — to portray Judy Warren), will suffer emotionally and psychologically due to her inherited psychic powers. Ed is feeling less than vibrant following his heart attack and related health restrictions. That a recent blockbuster comedy (yes, *that one*) turned his life’s work into a punchline isn’t helping either.

Meanwhile, the Smurl family, living in West Pittston, Pennsylvania, is quickly having their world turned upside down by an escalating series of violent supernatural events. Maybe next time, don’t buy that creepy, gothic-looking mirror from a local antique store, but c’est la vie. Anyway, these two stories run parallel for much of the film, with the Warrens coping with nearing that “age where life stops giving you things and starts taking them away,” while the Smurls (a married couple, one set in in-laws and four daughters) coping with both the potentially murderous supernatural menace and a comparatively disbelieving community and a seemingly indifferent church. Circumstances arise and — with the elder Warrens still reluctant to unretire — Judy takes it upon herself to attempt to replicate her parents’ stock-in-trade. However, that may be precisely what the ghosts and/or goblins have been counting on.

The references to Ghosbusters are both appropriate and ironic. The Warrens’ respective arcs are not unlike that of Dr. Erin Gilbert (Kristen Wiig) and Dr. Abigail L. Yates (Melissa McCarthy), with the former wanting credit and professional glory for the supernatural science, and the latter considering a job well done to be reward enough. This all comes to a head in the protracted and frankly overlong third act that overdoes the expected (but no less generic) exorcism tropes. It also undercuts some of its storytelling by turning Judy into a proverbial prize to be bartered over amid an effects-filled finale that (like many films in this genre) offers almost random razzle-dazzle and a high-peril conflict that is, of course, resolved with comparatively arbitrary words and deeds. To be fair, there’s a reason this secular Jew prefers The Exorcist III: Legion to The Exorcist.

“Oh no!” you might be thinking, “A Conjuring movie climaxed with our heroes (theoretically… no spoilers) vanguishing a mostly unseen demonic entity by invoking Jesus, reading from the Bible and waving their crosses to-and-fro, however, shall we cope?” And yes, the exorcism scenes have always been my least favorite bits from such films, and I tend to favor ones like The Haunting in Connecticut, The Unholy and The Omen that pivot around it. An as-expected formulaic finale can’t remotely negate an uncommonly compelling preceding 90 minutes. Wilson and Farmiga deliver as the characters’ mixed feelings about going through this again, and theoretically being done with it all, are mimicked in the now 52-year-old actors. As Paul Bettany — who has played his share of religiously specific heroes and villains — noted when playing a robotic Jesus stand-in, “a thing isn’t beautiful because it lasts.”

The Conjuring was Hollywood’s one unmitigatingly successful post-Avengers cinematic universe. Like the House That Feige Built, it sprang from a single more-successful-than-expected standalone movie and used the earned goodwill to offer audiences more of what they had already tried and enjoyed. And like the MCU, The Conjuring Universe was built predominantly on its heroic protagonists (the funny, snarky, religious yet non-judgemental and empathetic — at least in these films — Warrens) and its specific pleasures (period piece Catholic-specific exorcism stories that were sincerely religious without being evangelical, and R-rated without being gore-drenched) that made it stand out whether or not you gave a damn about interconnectivity. ‘Tis a grim irony that this successful successor to The Avengers (just as Twilight was the next Harry Potter partially by being almost nothing like Harry Potter) remembered the world-building lessons that even the MCU eventually forgot.

There is something impactful about this franchise concluding, and concluding quite well, while it’s still popular. After all, this is an era of franchises continuing to soldier on well past the natural life cycle in the hopes that *this time* audiences will show up to a Terminator reboot or a non-Michael Bay-directed Transformers sequel. Yes, this being a finale is as much about corporate changeover, with James Wan’s Atomic Robot currently working alongside Jason Blum’s Blumhouse at Universal, as artistic discretion. But the “they have been our guides, our protectors and our friends” sentiment is genuine. The films, both the Conjuring sequels and the Conjuring spin-offs, have earned this proverbial swan song. That includes an epilogue that resembles one of my very favorite television series finales. As we come to the end, I’ll merely declare that it was a privilege to be among them.

** “Who are you?” “I’m Judy.” “Judy who?”
(sees the ghosts of Bathsheba, Valek the Nun, La Llorona, Feeley Meeley, The Crooked Man, Malthus, Slappy the Dummy and Bathsheba)… “Judy Conjuring.”

I will put your mind at ease and assure you that this does not happen at any point in New Line and Warner Bros.’ The Conjuring: Last Rites. However, we are also denied another song performed by Patrick Wilson over the end credits. We ask for so little…