112 min | R | June 4, 2021 | Warner Bros. Pictures
A young man stands trial for murder and pleads not guilty by reason of demonic possession. Ed and Lorraine Warren leave the haunted house behind and chase a curse into a courtroom. The premise promises something new and then runs back to the same old tricks.
Arne Cheyne Johnson kills his landlord and claims the devil made him do it. Ed and Lorraine Warren take the stand to prove it. The film abandons the haunted-house formula of the first two entries and becomes a procedural about a real 1981 trial. The Warrens investigate a Satanic curse that travels from a possessed child into a grown man. The film is really about the limits of the franchise’s own template. It works best when it stops trying to be a courtroom drama and lets the Warrens do their detective work.
Vera Farmiga plays Lorraine Warren as a woman who experiences the murders through psychic vision and pays for every contact with the dead. She carries the investigation while Ed recovers from a heart attack. Patrick Wilson plays Ed Warren with weary devotion to both his wife and his faith. The two share a marriage that feels lived-in, and their scenes together hold the film upright. Ruairí O’Connor plays Arne as a decent man fighting something inside him he cannot name. Julian Hilliard plays the possessed boy David Glatzel with a contorted physicality the camera lingers on too long.
Michael Chaves directs from a screenplay by David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick, with James Wan handing off story duties and the director’s chair. Chaves stages the possession set pieces with crash zooms and a desaturated palette that drains the warmth out of every frame. The score by Joseph Bishara leans on shrieking strings to manufacture dread the images cannot earn. The waterbed sequence and a morgue chase show real craft in their staging and timing. The film telegraphs its scares with long silences that announce the jolt before it lands. Chaves understands the mechanics of a jump scare without understanding what made the earlier films frightening.
The case for the defense is more interesting than the film built around it. A trial that hinges on demonic possession should generate tension from the collision of law and faith. The film spends almost no time in the courtroom and reduces the legal premise to a frame around another exorcism. Farmiga and Wilson deserve a story worthy of the marriage they have spent three films constructing. This one gives them an occultist, a curse, and a finale that resolves with the same beats as everything before it. The devil made them do it, and the franchise made it familiar.