Trailer, via Warner Bros. UK & Ireland.
Annabelle review: a porcelain doll, a dead cultist, and 99 minutes of nothing
Annabelle opens with a gift. In 1967 Santa Monica, medical student John Form gives his pregnant wife Mia a rare vintage porcelain doll for their first child’s nursery. Within a night, their next-door neighbors the Higginses are murdered in a home invasion, and one of the killers dies in that nursery holding the doll. The film’s tagline promises “Before the Conjuring, there was Annabelle.” What there was, it turns out, is 99 minutes of a prop doing nothing.
John R. Leonetti and a $6.5 million budget
Director John R. Leonetti, working from Gary Dauberman’s script, built this as a spin-off and prequel to 2013’s The Conjuring — the second installment in The Conjuring Universe. Peter Safran and James Wan produced. Principal photography began in January 2014 in Los Angeles, and the film premiered at the TCL Chinese Theatre on September 29, 2014, before Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema released it in the United States on October 3.
The math is the most interesting thing about it. Produced for $6.5 million, Annabelle grossed over $257 million worldwide. That return, not the film, is the story.
“Before the Conjuring, there was Annabelle.”
A cult, a demon, and a move to Pasadena
The plot mechanics are thin and they arrive late. After the attack, Mia gives birth to a daughter, Leah, and the family moves to an apartment in Pasadena. The doll — which John had discarded — turns up in a box. More disturbances follow. Mia learns from the detective on the original case that the cult meant to summon a demonic spirit; the assailants were the Higginses’ estranged daughter, Annabelle, and her boyfriend, both cult members.
Bookseller and fellow tenant Evelyn helps Mia piece it together: the cult practiced devil worship and summoned a demon that followed the family to claim a soul. Father Perez, the parish priest, explains that demons sometimes attach themselves to inanimate objects to reach their goals. That is the whole engine. A doll sits there. A demon moves it.
Annabelle Wallis carries what the script won’t
Annabelle Wallis plays Mia with real strain in her face, and Ward Horton is serviceable as John. Alfre Woodard, as Evelyn, is the only performer given anything resembling an interior life, and the film mostly parks her in a chair to dispense exposition. Tony Amendola’s Father Perez exists to explain rules. Eric Ladin’s Detective Clarkin exists to hand over a case file.
The rest of the cast — Kerry O’Malley, Brian Howe, Ivar Brogger, Gabriel Bateman, Shiloh Nelson, Morganna Bridgers, Michelle Romano — fill rooms without leaving a mark.
Where the film actually fails
Horror needs a threat you can name and a space you can fear. Annabelle has neither. The 1967 setting gestures at the Manson Family and the Tate murders on the news, then does nothing with that dread except borrow its gravity. The doll is a fixed object; the demon has no face worth remembering; the apartment in Pasadena is lit like every other apartment in every other possession film of its decade.
What the film does have is a premise the audience already trusted, because The Conjuring earned it a year earlier. Annabelle spends that credit rather than adding to it. A prequel can deepen a mythology or simply monetize it. This one monetizes it, then hands the deeper work to Annabelle: Creation, released August 11, 2017.
The $257 million is not evidence the film worked. It is evidence the brand did.
The numbers behind Annabelle
- Release date: October 3, 2014 (US)
- Premiere: September 29, 2014, TCL Chinese Theatre
- Runtime: 99 minutes
- Budget: $6.5 million
- Worldwide gross: over $257 million
- Metacritic: 37/100
- Score: 3.7 of 10
Verdict: 3.7 of 10. Annabelle is a prequel that mistakes a famous prop for a character and a hit for a success.
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