Thanks, I Hate It: The Conjuring

James Wan's surprise horror hit The Conjuring is one of the emptiest movies I've ever seen. Its threat is a sort of anti-family, a lone woman who preys on children for occult purposes, positioned against the wholesome white picket fence dream of the haunting-afflicted Perron family and the clean-cut paranormal investigators, the Warrens, played by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga, whom they call for help. The family is stressed out by their nemesis and her witchcraft, then they defeat her and go back to life as usual. There's a hint of familial tension but nothing that isn't wiped away the second the final exorcism is over. It's thematically barren even when it gestures toward emotion.

The Conjuring is shot entirely in grays, greens, and blues, all washed out by design, all resolutely in step with the color palette of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. Wan is competent in his use of shadow, depicting darkness as a kind of oily hiding place from which clean, surprising images like a pair of arms or a demonic face might emerge at any time. His sets are dressed believably. It is in every way a serviceable movie, but it has no ideas and no visual imagination. It reads, as my friend and fellow critic Sean T. Collins once said, like an episode in some uninspired horror procedural in its tenth season on NBC. 

Farmiga has a certain tense fragility to her, bringing enough nuance to her character that the film's uninspired writing doesn't drag her down, but the rest of the cast is unmemorable. The script, penned by twin brothers Chad and Carey Hayes, does them few favors, lurching from one set piece to the next with boilerplate tedium and a total lack of character work. The entire film boils down to "what if something bad happened to a nice family?" There simply isn't enough characterization on offer to take it any deeper than that asinine premise.

The Conjuring amounts to little more an exercise in bare proficiency untouched by anything approaching creative spirit. It retraces the steps of better movies like The Haunting and The Exorcist while bringing nothing to the table but more kids to menace and more square-jawed, likable American guys to sympathize with as we watch their perfect lives teeter on a knife's edge. It's hard to connect with a movie where the central conflict is less dangerous and frightening than the daily lives of actual people.