The Conjuring: Last Rites (2025)

2 Stars (out of 4)

Slack Mirror

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

The fourth and supposed final movie in the successful horror series — and the ninth in the overall Conjuring Universe — Michael Chaves's 135-minute The Conjuring: Last Rites takes an unreasonably long time to get set up, and then rushes through the finale as if none of it mattered.

It's 1964 and Ed and Lorraine Warren are on one of their first cases, involving a haunted mirror. A pregnant Lorraine touches the mirror and immediately feels labor pains. She is rushed to the hospital where their daughter is still-born and remains dead for one minute before she comes back to life.

Years later, in 1986, grown-up daughter Judy (Mia Tomlinson) is dating Tony (Ben Hardy), and Ed (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) are no longer tackling supernatural forces, due to Ed's heart condition. In Pittston, Pennsylvania, the evil mirror surfaces again, and is given as a Confirmation gift to teen Heather Smurl (Kíla Lord Cassidy).

It's not long before the Smurl family begins experiencing terrifying events in their home, and begin to believe that their lives are at stake. Can Ed and Lorraine risk everything to help one more time?

Truthfully, Ed and Lorraine are great characters; they have strong chemistry, and their lore — loosely based on real cases — is fascinating. Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson are a fine team and make the couple work beautifully. It's tempting to give The Conjuring: Last Rites a pass because of them.

But the film seems to want to provide an emotional and epic ending to the story, and it feels more like a last gasp, based more on profit than on storytelling. It tries to build characters and establish relationships, but, for all that, it takes more than 90 minutes before the Warrens even set foot in the haunted house.

Director Chaves is responsible for three (now four) of the weaker entries in the series (The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, The Nun II, and the "unofficial" entry The Curse of La Llorona), and he favors a combination of effective, simple chills with a bunch of silly, overly familiar frights and jump-scares. (Frankly, it feels insulting that an expert like Lorraine would fall for a couple of the lamer ones.)

And — like all three previous movies — while it promises that this particular case concerns an evil unlike anything the Warrens have ever faced before, the showdown here is disappointingly underwhelming. It's too bad that the series couldn't have ended on a high note, but The Conjuring: Last Rites is at least, hopefully, an ending.