"Annabelle" Review

 

Annabelle is a spin-off of last year's horror hit The Conjuring, but that's not to say the film is strictly for the series faithful. Although imperfect as a horror movie and certainly not on the narrative or technical levels of its immediate predecessor, there's enough here to let Annabelle stand proudly on its own merits with its freak-flag high.

The film picks up sometime before the events of The Conjuring with a young Catholic family listening to a Sunday sermon about what sacrifice means in the eyes of God - that it pleases Him and moves His hand to act in positive ways. The crux of the story, however, is the inverse of that; sacrifice to Satan conjures unspeakable evil. Our family, Mia (appropriately, Annabelle Wallis) and John (Ward Horton), are about to welcome a new baby into their lives. One night, Mia and John's next-door neighbors are brutally slain by their estranged daughter, Annabelle, and her boyfriend, who are members of a satanic cult. When John intervenes next door, he inadvertently sics the satanic sickos on himself, his wife and their unborn child. The police arrive just in time to quell the situation, and detectives later insist that this was a heinous act of violence for violence's sake. "Crazy people do crazy things," says Detective Clarkin (Eric Ladin). But Mia starts to experience strange happenings around the home, all seeming to originate from a rare doll in the baby's room that Annabelle took a liking to moments before she was killed.

It seems Annabelle sacrificed her parents in homage to the devil, thus conjuring a demon from Hell. (The other title makes sense now, doesn't it??) Upon her death, the demon uses the doll as a conduit, like a doorway into the sentient world. It preys on Mia and her family in search of another sacrifice - a soul that it can take back to Hell.

Myriad jump scares and Rosemary's Baby allusions ensue.

The acting isn't great especially from Horton as John, the young family patriarch. His character is never around when the bad stuff happens to his wife, so he consistently abandons his post as a med student in-training to come running to his wife's rescue. This is a narrative pattern which quickly grows annoying. There are times when you think John has real Guy Woodhouse potential but instead remains disappointingly one-note.

Some of the scares work and some don't, despite a consistent sense of dread throughout. I always felt like something bad could happen at any time, even during the day. There are plenty of cheap jumps like most horror movies, but there are also plenty of really freakin' scary ones too, in particular those involving the demon in the film's latter half. Genre fans will have to experience this one for themselves and decide if Annabelle is worthy or not, but my extremely low expectations were definitely surpassed.

B-