Krishna
This is the second instalment of the Conjuring Series, which are paranormal happenings investigated by the husband and wife team of Ed and Lorraine Warren. In the first Conjuring movie, you learn that the duo collects sample artifacts from their cases and put them in a room in their house. The same tradition continues here.
I feel that this movie, though interesting, does not live up to the terror standards of the original. Some of the elements are there. There is also this struggle where every séance and the visions Lorraine uses to solve the cases takes a lot out of her and Ed is scared that one more of that may kill her. And the scenes where they want to give up their cases to focus on a normal life but trouble finds them in the form of people who desperately need their help and have nowhere else to go.
The story is kind of a letdown. There is a family in England, where the young girl called Janet seems to have been taken over by a malevolent demon. There are interesting scenes where Janet wakes up in the middle of the night and finds herself in a different part of the house. She gets upset, suspecting that she is suffering from somnambulism, and ties herself to the bed but still wakes up in the living room, having had no memory of how she got there.
There are also interesting scenes when people refuse to buy the story of a malevolent presence in the house (first when the mother refuses to believe and later when investigators do not believe), stuff like the bed started moving right in front of them.
There is a complicated story about how the old man who seems to be threatening Janet was a decoy all along and the real demon is a very dangerous spirit who is using the old man to do her bidding and almost too late they go back to save the day.
Some of the ideas still creep you out, like how Lorraine finds a vision of Ed being impaled on a sharp tree trunk and how it nearly comes to pass.
The end of the story – how they overcome the spirit – is comically absurd, reminding you of a famous fairy tale (If I told you which one, it would be a spoiler here) – and that is another reason for feeling that this story does not measure up.
Give it a miss unless you are such a fan of Conjuring that you simply have to see every movie in the series.
I cannot see myself awarding this more than 4/ 10
– – Krishna