By the time The Conjuring: The Last Rites happens as the ninth entry in the Conjuring film series, Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson, Vera Farmiga) have had enough with demonic close encounters.

Ed has developed a heart condition and Lorraine, her senses still sharply attuned to the undead, wants to shift gears into a quiet suburban life — particularly one where their daughter Judy (Mia Tomlinson) doesn’t get haunted by entities that go boo in the night.

As, reportedly, the final entry of Ed and Lorraine’s adventures — there is a sweet, warm closure at the end of the film — The Last Rites is about family, and an old encounter that returns with a vengeance.

Twenty-two years before the main story, Ian Goldberg, Richard Naing and David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick’s screenplay (based on the story by Johnson-McGoldrick and James Wan) takes the Warrens to an old curio shop whose owner committed suicide, and whose daughter feels something evil is in their storage.

The object is a wicked-looking mirror, whose demons scare the Warrens and triggers an early labour for Lorraine. Rushing to the hospital, Judy was still-born for a minute. The child miraculously survives, but the close encounter leaves a spiritual scar: she continues to hear and see whispers of the demons and the undead even into adulthood.

The Conjuring: The Last Rites is a last film about the Warren family and an old encounter that returns with a vengeance

In the present (the film is set in 1984), Ed and Lorraine have all but hung up their ghost-busting services.

When the Smurl family, loud and full of life, move into a house in West Pittston, Pennsylvania, their happiness is short-lived as the grandfather presents the demon-infested mirror to Heather (Kíla Lord Cassidy). The mirror, and its malevolence, makes the Smurl family a media sensation (the real Smurl family were popular enough that 20th Century Fox made a tele-movie about them in 1991), and eventually Ed and Lorraine find themselves face-to-face with the evil mirror from their past.

Director Michael Chaves, now a veteran of the Conjuring universe — he directed The Curse of La Llorona, The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, and The Nun II — puts the emphasis on the well-established human characters, giving Wilson, Farmiga, Tomlinson, Ben Hardy (playing Judy’s boyfriend), and the actors of the Smurl family, enough space to perform amidst done-to-death horror tropes — the kitchen sink overflowing with blood, the creepy doll, the people with white make-up that lurk in the shadows.

By the end, although the horror is virtually non-existent — and this is coming from someone who loves getting scared watching movies — and the fact that the demons and their exorcism are ineffectively, inexpertly pulled off (we only get a fleeting backstory of the evil at large), the pull of the actors and the slow, emotionally grounded, almost reverential storytelling of the Warrens’ last big adventure, makes the film the second-best entry in The Conjuring movies.

Playing in cinemas now with a staggering 184 shows Pakistan-wide alone last Sunday, The Conjuring: The Last Rites is rated A, but is suitable for teenagers and above

Published in Dawn, ICON, September 21st, 2025