Annabelle Comes Home – Review

Annabelle Comes Home

Directed by: Gary Dauberman

Runtime: 106 demon-spewing minutes

Annabelle Comes Home is a successful horror film. It’s the follow-up to 2014’s Annabelle and 2017’s Annabelle: Creation, and is the seventh film in the Conjuring series in general. If there’s one thing we know about evil dolls, it’s that it’s never going to be as simple as defeating it once. It’s never the evil toys that break easily. That is not the tagline to Toy Story 4.

Often you find yourself rooting against the characters in a horror film. Annabelle Comes Home sidesteps that lazy convention, and the Conjuring series, in general, seems to pride itself on giving audiences likable personalities to become attached to. Mckenna Grace, Madison Iseman, Katie Sarife, and Michael Cimino all win you over. They’re nice people. You don’t want bad things to happen to nice people. Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson return in their paranormal investigator roles, but they get called away on business and it is left to the younger generation to deal with Annabelle and her evil buddies.

Another wise thing the Conjuring series has done is set up its own lore and iconography. When we see that bridal dress or we see fog outside the Warren warren, we know what is coming. The series has earned those scares from its fans, and it can borrow against its own lore.

Gary Dauberman sits in the director’s chair for the first time in Comes Home. Although it’s not likely to be up for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, Dauberman has done a commendable job. There are a few wonderful images. I particularly liked a colourful sequence when some sort of spirit guard is knocked over, and filtered light flashes around the place. It gets pretty punk rock there.

The sound direction is wonderful. Joseph Bishara, who composed the score for The Conjuring movies and Annabelle is back. When malevolent spirits are getting close, there is a rumbling on the track that generates a lot of unease. The sound in horror films can be cheap, but Comes Home feels like it warrants the tension.

If I have to find fault with some element of Comes Home, it’s that its CGI is a little hokey for my tastes. This has been an issue for me in other entries in the series too. I can’t help laughing at that werewolf, which is not the tone anyone is going for in this particular series, which otherwise conducts itself in quite a prideful way. Still, Conjuring movies don’t tend to lean on one type of scare too much. A film centred on a werewolf that looked like that might fall down, but it’s just one aspect to Comes Home’s overall effect. It’s mixed in with some suspense and some more practical effects.

If you’re going to go and see a haunted doll movie, you aren’t making a bad decision to see Annabelle Comes Home. It loves its characters and its lore, and it’s refreshing to see a horror film where you are pulling for the protagonists instead of calling for their heads.