The Conjuring 2 sends Ed and Lorraine Warren to north London, where a single mother is raising four children in a council house that something else has already claimed. James Wan directs. The film runs 134 minutes. It is a horror picture, and it is the second Conjuring and the third entry in the Conjuring Universe.
It is also the one where the franchise stops trusting its own best idea.
Trailer, via Warner Bros..
The Hodgson house in Enfield
The setup is the strongest thing in the film. In 1977, Janet Hodgson, the second-oldest of four children, plays with a ouija board. After that the house turns. Janet sleepwalks. She holds conversations with the spirit of an angry old man. When the press comes to interview the family, Janet is possessed by Bill Wilkins, who lived and died in that house.
Madison Wolfe plays Janet. Frances O’Connor plays her mother, Peggy. The film gives the Hodgsons a real texture — four kids, one parent, a house that has become a spectacle — and for a while that is enough.
Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson return as Lorraine and Ed. Farmiga carries the dread. Wilson carries the warmth. The pairing still works.
Amityville, the nun, and the vision
The film opens in 1976 at the Amityville house, where the Warrens investigate whether a demonic presence was responsible for Ronald DeFeo Jr. killing his family on November 13, 1974, and for the haunting that followed involving the Lutz family.
During a seance, Lorraine is pulled into a vision. She sees a demonic nun. She sees Ed impaled. That image sits on the film for the rest of its runtime.
One year later the Hodgsons call. The Warrens are asked to determine whether Janet’s possession is a hoax. Lorraine, afraid her vision will come true, has another vision of the nun, and the demon speaks its name. She scratches that name into her Bible while in a trance.
What the movie does with a real case
The Enfield case is famous partly because it was contested. The film knows this and builds its middle act around it. Ed and Lorraine consult other investigators, including Maurice Grosse, played by Simon McBurney, and Anita Gregory. Gregory shows video of Janet wrecking the kitchen on purpose, which discredits the haunting.
That is the most interesting material in The Conjuring 2. A family that might be lying. Investigators who might be fooled. A girl who might be performing. The movie sets up a genuine question and then answers it the easy way.
Ed and Lorraine leave, unsure whether the haunting is real or the family is chasing fame. Then they learn that Wilkins’ spirit is only a pawn. The real demon is the nun, and it wants to break Janet’s will. Lorraine’s abilities had been blocked by the nun, which is why she could not see the truth of the possession.
The couple quickly returns to the Hodgson house, and the film resolves into a confrontation with the nun. The ambiguity that made the film’s first act work fades from there, and that fade is the film’s own choice, not a fact of the case.
Here is the ranking of what the film gets right, in order:
- Madison Wolfe’s Janet, the film’s center and its best performance.
- The Enfield house itself, a cramped and credible setting.
- Farmiga and Wilson, who make the Warrens feel like a marriage.
- The nun, who is scary in small doses and less so in large ones.
- The Amityville opening, which is well made and belongs to a different movie.
The nun problem
The nun is the film’s biggest miscalculation. Bonnie Aarons plays the Demon Nun, and the design is effective. But the demon belongs to a different franchise logic than the Hodgsons do. Enfield is a story about a girl and a house and a press circus. The nun is a franchise villain with a name and a mythology, and every time the film cuts to it, the air goes out of the room.
The Conjuring 2 was released in the United States on June 10, 2016, by Warner Bros. Pictures and New Line Cinema, after a world premiere at TCL Chinese Theatre on June 7, 2016. It grossed $323 million worldwide and drew generally positive reviews. A spin-off prequel, The Nun, followed.
That is the tell. The nun was not a character in this story. It was a pitch.
The film was developed fast. New Line Cinema was already working on a sequel in July 2013, before the first film opened, with Farmiga and Wilson signed to return. By October 2014, Wan was set to direct and to write for the franchise for the first time. Principal photography ran from September 2015 in Los Angeles to December 2015 in London. The screenplay is credited to Chad Hayes, Carey W. Hayes, Wan, and David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick.
That timeline shows. The Enfield half of The Conjuring 2 is patient and specific. The nun half is a trailer for something else.
The film is at its best when it stays small — a girl, a mother, four children, a house that will not let them sleep. It is at its worst when it reaches for a bigger monster. Wan can stage a scare, and the 134 minutes move. But in this paper’s view, the movie keeps trading its own ambiguity for a demon with a name, and that trade is a loss.
The Conjuring 2 is a good haunted-house film wearing a franchise’s clothes. 6.5 of 10.
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