Movies & TV The Conjuring: Last Rites The Conjuring: Last Rites Hits Both the Highs and Lows of the Series Ed and Lorraine Warren are back to defeat evil with LOVE and terrible outfits. By Leah Schnelbach | Published on September 5, 2025 Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures The Conjuring: Last Rites might be my favorite in the series. Notice I did not say BEST—I think the best of the series is The Conjuring 2. But the parts of this one that worked really worked for me, and if this is the last time we see the Warrens, they get a send-off that’s a fun and breezy time at the movies. (The horror genre’s version of “fun and breezy”, at least.) If you like this series, you’ll almost certainly like this film, but I’ll get into a few of the things that didn’t work at the end of this review. Last Rites was written by Ian Goldberg, Richard Naing, and David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick, and directed by Michael Chaves. All of the usual suspects are back, with the Warrens’ daughter Judy (Mia Tomlinson) taking a more prominent role, along with her new boyfriend Tony (Ben Hardy).    We open with a highly-significant setpiece featuring a haunted mirror in 1964. Then the film jumps ahead to the mid-1980s, where the mirror is still causing problems, and the Warrens’ paranormal lectures aren’t as packed as they used to be. (The kids tend to lose interest when they find out no ghosts will be busted on stage.) The story cuts between the latest haunting and the Warrens’ home life circa 1986. The haunting in this one starts off great. A large, loud (so loud) rambunctious Catholic family, the Smurls, all live together in a crowded house. Dad Jack, Mom Janet, Jack’s parents Mary and John, teens Dawn and Heather, and younger twins Carin and Shannon. We join them on the morning of  Heather’s confirmation. Jack is proud and enthusiastically uses a clunky video camera to film the service and the dinner afterwards. The dinner, notably, is just the family at home, not a big feast at a restaurant or anything. The family has a new-ish TV, a VCR, and the aforementioned camera, but we only see one small car, and the furniture is all older and well-used. The house has enough space for all eight of them, but none of the daughters has their own room. Jack’s the only one we see going to work each day, but we never learn what he does. So, by Pennsylvanian 1980s standards, they’re in the middle of the middle class—which means they can’t afford to leave when the haunting starts. There are Poltergeists everywhere for those with eyes to see. Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures At the dinner, Mary and John unveil their confirmation gift, which is the GIANT CARVED WOODEN MIRROR from the opening section, because of course it. They got it at an estate sale! They got a great deal! WHEN will people in horror movies learn to walk away from these estate sale deals? Heather immediately gets a bad vibe, pretends to be excited about this weird, weird gift, and the haunting chugs along. The basement? Not good. The twins’ talking doll? Really not good. Every single mirror in the house? Probably shouldn’t look into ‘em. If you’ve ever seen a haunted house movie you can predict all the beats, but it’s still fun because the family feels real, and the film absolutely nails 1980s Pennsylvania. Unlike the weird timelessness of the first two films, the characters here reference Ghostbusters and The Goonies. The girls’ shirts tells us that they like Culture Club, Care Bears, and the Steelers, and ‘80s hits play on the radio. It all helps to make this story feel like it’s grounded in time. As for the Warren family, this film is largely about the passage of time. Ed’s heart problems have only gotten worse since the last movie (he has to quit hunting ghosts, and worse than that, start eating fish and vegetables) and he seems to be exhausted even by a fun game of ping pong. It’s a good thing dark forces won’t conspire to drag him back into his old life or anything. Daughter Judy has grown up. She’s dating a young man named Tony, and he’s not just okay with all the supernatural stuff, he’s actively interested in it. This seems like a good thing, except Judy did in fact inherit her mom’s abilities, and her visions proved so overwhelming that  Lorraine urged her to block them out with a meditative rhyme rather than confront them. As you can probably guess, this drives the plot. Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures There is so much Catholic kitsch in this movie, I’m fairly certain an Italian grandma exploded on set—and RIP to Marie Theresa or whatever, but it looks great. If there’s a flat surface available, you better believe there’s a statue of a saint or a rosary on it. No wall is complete without a crucifix. The home of the afflicted family even features a life-sized bust of Jesus—I’ve never even seen one of those in a home! This series has always fascinated me because I like religious horror. As with folk horror, it’s fun to watch modern people deal with older ritual. At its best, religious horror can work in a lot of social commentary as well—but the Conjuring series has always gone for a much more practical approach. Lorraine walks around using her rosary like it’s a fucking dowsing rod, Ed bellows incantations and waves crucifixes around, sometimes there’s an ineffectual priest cowering in the background, it’s great. And then Ed can make pancakes or fix the family car or whatever, and Lorraine can have extremely emotional heart-to-hearts with one of the afflicted family members in between bursts of supernatural shenanigans. There’s some of that here, but I fear the film is trying to do a little too much to let the quieter moments open up the way they have in previous films. The Smurls never become full characters the way the Perrons and Hodgsons did, or even Arnie and Debbie in The Devil Made Me Do It. And Chaves does a good job building atmosphere in the first half, but I missed James Wan’s verve. (Guess I’ll just have to watch Malignant again.)   Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures The performances are excellent as ever. Patrick Wilson has been one of my favorites since he played Joe in Angels in America in 2003, and he’s balances Ed’s gruff mid-century man’s man style with vulnerability, like he knows the toughness is just a performance. But now he adds a new dimension as his heart gets worse and he has to admit that he’s aging out of battling ghosts. Vera Farmiga provides her usual warm presence, but here it’s darkened a bit by her desire to protect Judy from the family business. Mia Tomlinson and Ben Hardy are both solid as Judy and her beau Tony. And all the Smurl family members are fantastic, realistically loving and prickly—we just needed more time with them and their daily life as the haunting intensifies. The actual demons are frightening enough for jump scares, but none of them are at the level of Crooked Man, Annabelle, or Possessed Janet Hodgson. Which gets at the problem with the film. Apart from the excellent setting, there’s a lack of specificity to the film. Yes there are ghosts, and a demonic presence, but I never got a sense of them as individual entities that were attacking the Smurls and the Warrens in particular. To get into why this was a problem for me, I’ll have to get into spoilers, so if you don’t want to know anything about the film, skip down four paragraphs, after the next section break. There’s a point where the Warrens’ priest, Father Gordon, goes to visit the Smurls. Only Janet is home, and Father Gordon walks from room to room splashing holy water around. When the basement floor literally smokes he begins to suspect this problem is beyond him. He says he’ll “talk to the Church” and leaves, and the next thing we know he’s in an office waiting for a Father McKenzie. His slow realization that he’s walked into a supernatural trap is maybe the most affecting in the movie. He responds with faith and a crucifix, but in this case the demonic presence overpowers him, and he hangs himself. I had two issues with this. First: this demon is able to utterly cow a lifelong priest who’s worked with the Warrens for years, and Seen Some Shit, to the point that he commits suicide. This implies that this demon is somehow more formidable than anything else we’ve encountered in this series, since Father Gordon walked away unscathed from all those cases. But the rest of the film really doesn’t back this up. My other issue might just be me. I recently watched an ‘80s thriller called The Rosary Murders for a project. (A very young Jack White is in it as an altar server!) The movie is fine—I think Exorcist III covers most of its themes to greater effect. But there’s one scene that’s stuck with me, where the main character, a priest played by Donald Sutherland, thinks he’s about to be murdered. In that moment, even though it’s been made clear that his commitment to his vocation is shaky, he says the Act of Contrition—and Sutherland makes the scene terrifying. Despite Last Rites being cluttered with Catholic kitsch, there wasn’t a moment that felt so raw and desperate, not even this Father Gordon scene, and that’s what I think the movie was missing. OK I’m done spoiling stuff, you can come back! Let me talk more generally about one of my issues with Last Rites. You usually receive first communion when you’re about 7, because that’s when, in the eyes of the Church, you’ve entered the age of reason and you’re expected to know right from wrong. Confirmation comes later and is more akin to a bar or bat mitzvah—I’ve always understood it to mark the point when you become a full member of the Church, and it’s a little more of a choice than baptism or first communion. (Although I guess that depends on the family.) I mention this because I think the film missed an opportunity to lean on the timing. Since the Conjuring series has always been steeped in folk Catholicism, it would make sense to have Heather’s confirmation ceremony be a crux point, and to relate the haunting to her worries about impending adulthood, or concerns about her faith. In the same way, despite the Warrens being super mega Catholic, when Judy is beset by visions Lorriane teaches her a nonsense rhyme to calm herself rather than any of the many, many spiritual recitations that are available to her. Which might be part of the point—if you’re trying to block an extra-natural force out of your life, maybe you don’t want to double down on ritual. But then that, too, could have been part of the point, given that Last Rites’ becomes Judy’s story as it goes along. Despite all of those quibbles, though, it was fun to watch, and even if it never hits the spooky heights of the first two films, I thought it was a big improvement on The Devil Made Me Do It, and a fitting end to this part of the Warrens Cinematic Universe if this ends up being their last outing.[end-mark] The post <em>The Conjuring: Last Rites</em> Hits Both the Highs and Lows of the Series appeared first on Reactor.