The Conjuring: Last Rites (2025)

The Conjuring 4: An End, To Be Sure | 2/5

Written by Noah Dietz: 9/16/2025

“Pennsylvania… God only knows why he was out there.”

We’ve finally done it, the last (mainline) Conjuring movie. Earlier this year when I went through all of the franchise, I was tired. It’s not a good enough franchise to binge, and by the time we got to the end I was disliking even the ones that I’d had neutral positive opinions on. Calling them the Marvel movies of Catholic horror really does sum it up. Always fine, never special, and a lot of people will act like they’re far deeper than they really are because they might not be as familiar with the things they are referencing (or wholesale ripping from). The problem I have is when people will insist that these “are pretty great, actually.” It’s the same kind of “don’t get in your head about it, it’s just supposed to be fun” that people will say about the Marvel films. The Conjuring Universe will always be the most milquetoast way of presenting whatever stories they tell, shielded in impenetrable layers of young fans defending every choice made.

Anyway, let’s talk about the movie, as well as a sort of retrospective on the franchise as a whole.

We open up with two intros. Intro one shows us a fully planned out opening that introduces the origin of our villain for this film, a giant mirror. Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) touches it, it cracks and tries to steal her baby’s lifeforce, and we get a super quick sequence of Judy Warren (Mia Tomlinson) being born and growing up after a miraculous recovery from being stillborn. After this ten-plus-minute sequence concludes, we move to intro two. Here we get introduced to the family who is going to be haunted for the remainder of our runtime. We see a girl take her first communion, and her grandparents give her the evil mirror as a gift. Because the house has eight people in it, we have a lot of names and faces to attach ourselves to. As the next ten minutes go on, we see the mirror thrown away, destroyed by a garbage truck, and a demonic curse kick off for the whole family. We’ve settled in, we’re ready for what the Smurl family is about to see, then … We cut back to the Warrens, because it’s Ed’s birthday and we need time to give a cameo to real-life Judy Warren and her husband, Tony.

This is easily my greatest complaint over the late-era Conjuring films. Judgment can and should be levied against the spinoff films like The Nun and Annabelle, but at least they follow a single storyline and don’t mess around too much. With all the Conjuring films after the original, we tend to fight the balance of the haunt storyline and the Warren storyline. The haunt will always come second to the Warrens’ plot, but that doesn’t stop the haunt from being clearly more interesting than anything else going on until the two worlds collide. For Last Rites our competing storylines are in full swing. As soon as you start to get invested in one of them, we swap to the other point of view. At no point are we able to settle into the story, because the way the stories are told fight against each other so hard that swapping from one side to the other grinds the progress to a halt while we reorient our viewing. There are films that are able to juggle competing storylines. Films that leave us wondering “but what’s happening over there?” while maintaining interest in the current arc aren’t even hard to find—all it takes is an ounce of balancing.

When we’re forced to confront two A plots with a C plot woven in, the only thing you can do is sit and wonder which plot is really the important one. Of course it’s the Warren plot, but the Smurl plot is so clearly important and time sensitive that it starts to overtake the true A plot. Unfortunately too much of the family plot can’t be explored because it happened before the real-life Warrens came to the scene. As such we have a full cast of characters that we’re all incredibly excited to get to learn about, only to see them sidelined so Patrick Wilson can talk about being on a heart healthy diet at an Italian place. They don’t matter, at the end of the day. We’re just here so Ed can point his wife toward the problem, then say, “Lorraine, be careful,” while being reminded he has a bad heart. The same plot we’ve seen since the second film.

This is to say nothing of our newest batch of ghouls. Of course Annebelle makes a return; it wouldn’t be a Conjuring film if she wasn’t somehow involved in brand new, painfully contrived ways. Our real “stars” are three spirits (not ghosts, those aren’t real), but they aren’t even malicious in and of themselves. They’re puppetted by a demon (very scary, those are real), who lives in the mirror I mentioned earlier. The spirits’ designs fall back to the Insidious school of “it’s scary if they smile”, with what was clearly meant to be a scary face reveal reducing me to tears of laughter because it just looked so… bad. Our scares are weak, our story is weak, and our pacing is horrific. We’re here for Lorraine to be the most important person in the world, who can’t do anything without her husband, for some reason.

I wish no ill will on Michael Chaves. I find his eye in these films to be shockingly consistent despite having a rotating selection of crew working with him. I think he has developed a great deal as a director over his last four films in the Conjur-verse, even if I personally don’t care for the films he’s made at all. Whenever he finally makes a movie that he has any reasonable amount of say in the creative process, I’ll happily go and see it. And with the box office for this entry netting back at least 6x the budget for the film at time of writing, I understand why he would keep making these. At the end of the day my primary complaint is that, for better or worse, The Conjuring is the face of modern horror for surface level viewers. People who don’t like horror will talk about these in the same way that my parents' generation would talk about Freddy, Jason, and Michael Myers. It’s still reductive to simplify horror down to the slasher subgenre, but it’s even more reductive to bring it down to a single franchise. I don’t intend to come off as strongly “old man yells at cloud” as I know I am at the moment, but a great deal of my frustration around this specific set of movies lands on how it’s simply not a good ambassador of the genre.

I’ll be hanging up reviews for anything else in this franchise now. I may change my mind if something new comes out that has some real teeth, but I don’t anticipate that based on the track record we’ve got. We’ll now return to our regularly scheduled program of new releases, and whatever else I happen to be seeing.