"The Conjuring 2" is a weirdly wholesome movie

NOTE: I've seen Conjuring One, but most of this is concerned with just what's happening in the sequel.

Rewatched The Conjuring 2 with my wife last night as it is one of our faves. I remember leaving the theater on the first watch thinking it was a touch underwhelming for a horror pic (it ends on a REAL light note and doesn't have too many horror sequences given its runtime), but by my second re-watch I loved it. And I think I know why--take away the graphic horror sequences and it's basically an old-fashioned, aw-shucks kind of family movie that doesn't really get made anymore. And me being a softie, I dig it.

At the center of the film are Ed and Lorraine, two of the most upstanding and capital-g Good characters in cinema history. These two would not be out of place as heads of household in a corny 70s sitcom, which is, not coincidentally, when this movie takes place. Like a Michael Scott job interview, their weaknesses are really just their strengths ("I care too much! I feel too hard! I love my spouse too much!") to the point where the final action set-piece is just a helpless, blinded Patrick Wilson refusing to acknowledge he's helpless and blinded, stumbling around the haunted house showing the viewers how noble he is.

Speaking of showing the audience how noble characters are, the movie dedicates a good twenty minutes to Ed and Lorraine just hanging around the aforementioned haunted house, being nice. A sink gets fixed, the daughter gets consoled with corny love stories (twice), and the entire group gets serenaded with an Elvis tune. This couple is not human; they are platonic ideals.

The afflicted family, the Hodgsons, also get treated with more care than your typical haunted-house brood. A hard-hitting "Hey we're in London" establishing montage ends with an extended sequence with the kids at school facing bullies and the put-upon Mom getting squirted in the face with a malfunctioning washing machine--all of which is mostly played for laughs. Seriously, the Hodgson stuff, outside of Valak and whatnot, could be straight out of a Disney movie about a talking dog.

And if it sounds like I think "The Conjuring 2" is corny, then yeah. It is REALLY corny. But it's the sentimental kind of corn, where all the good guys are really good and the bad guys are... demons. And it really works inside of a horror movie, where we are already expecting things to be unrealistic (a dog unfolds into the Crooked Man in this movie). And good on James Wan--he has grown tremendously as a story-teller and you can tell he feels the true way to scare the audience is to make them care about the characters first, and not just build a house-of-horrors around set-pieces and creatures (Insidious, Saw).

Submitted August 26, 2018 at 04:03AM by EachBoth https://ift.tt/2MwnttZ