The Conjuring (2013) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD - FILM FREAK CENTRAL (2024)

**/****
Image B+Sound A
Extras C-
starring
Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Ron Livingston, Lili Taylor
screenplay
by Chad Hayes & Carey W. Hayes
directed
by James Wan

by
Walter Chaw Based on a true story in the same way that
a pineapple is an apple, James Wan's latest exercise in jump-scare
theatre is
the workmanlike haunted house/demonic possession flick The
Conjuring. In
it, the paranormal investigation team of Ed (Patrick Wilson) and
Lorraine (Vera
Farmiga) Warren, co-authors of several books and shown as the film
begins
lecturing a small auditorium of people on the finer points of
ghost-hunting,
confront their Greatest Challenge Ever when they're called to the
modest New
England farmhouse of the Perron family. It seems this was the former
home of a WITCH! Can you f*cking believe the luck? An evil witch lived
in this
house. f*ck. A witch. Motherf*cker, am I right? You buy a house and you
think
that…anyway, it really sucks that a witch lived there. It all starts
out
innocently enough with the largely-indistinguishable Perron girls
getting
jerked out of bed by an invisible whatever, then evolves into a game of
hide
and clap (which sounds venereal but isn't, unless you're doing it
really wrong)
that leads to mommy Carolyn (Lili Taylor) getting thrown down a flight
of
stairs into a creepy, boarded-up cellar™. That's when daddy Roger (Ron
Livingston) calls the Warrens… Well, he doesn't,
because he's away on a
week-long business trip and he's a skeptic of the Warrens, we learn
after the
fact… Um… He's not a well-developed character, seeing as how Wan
seems
distracted by all the loud noises and crap leaping out at the camera.

To be fair, anyone hoping for characters,
tension, meaty exposition, meaningful subtext, or anything of the sort,
will leave The
Conjuring hungry. If you're looking, instead, for a movie
that does its
best to startle the poop out of you, well, look no farther. Though I
maintain
that popping up out of the bushes isn't art, there's a well-established
place for
films like this in the mating rituals of young Americans–one of many
ways that
youth culture can facilitate illicit contact under the guise of
innocent
experience. Honestly, that old-fashioned, William Castle gimmick
shock-buzzers
like The Conjuringremain popular is
actually kind of a
reassuring, nostalgic phenomenon. It's like taking your sweetie to the
malt
shop…with demons. Taylor is fantastic in the film, exuding
her natural warmth; Farmiga is also exceptional in the thankless role
of the "sensitive"
half of the Warren team. There's possibly a conversation to be had
about the
wisdom of the real-life Warrens keeping a "museum" of evil artifacts
in their home that they're always having to warn their young daughter
against
messing around with, but poking holes in movies like this, which are
mostly intended to make you drop your popcorn, is pretty futile.

The Conjuring looks good and has cast
itself with wisdom–so what if it relies heavily on tried-and-true
clichés of
the haunted house/exorcism genres without attempting to do anything
novel? There's something to be said, too, for a picture that wants to
do one thing, does it a dozen times or so, and ends with one of those
credit
sequences where we see actual photos of the fake people we just watched
run
around, screaming, for 112 minutes. Better films in this vein are
(Robert Wise's)The Haunting, The Others, The
Changeling (from which The Conjuringsteals
a gag), and, my personal fave of them all, The Innocents.
There's some degree of religiosity in the picture (The
Exorcist, after
all, is like Top Gun for Catholics–or vice
versa, I don't know; can you
believe it was a witch?) that's echoed in
interviews with the real-life
Warrens, but, honestly, this thing is so allergic to anything like
complexity
that it's not worth anyone's time to dig around in there, either. The
Conjuringisfun if you like expensive
jacks-in-the-boxes and surprise alarm clocks–I mean,
what the hell, who am I to judge? If you see it, I hope you'll tell me
what the
title means. In any case, it's harmless. I just wonder if demon-witch
movies
ought to be.

THE
BLU-RAY DISC
by
Bill Chambers Play it loud, that's my advice. The 5.1
DTS-HD MA track on Warner's Blu-ray release of The Conjuring
is dynamic
and eruptive, the perfect showcase for a mix that relies on all the
tricks of
digital-era horror (swirling pans, shrill stingers, brief vacuums of
silence),
but doesn't blow its wad early or descend into cacophony–two things
you can't
say for 1999's remake of The Haunting, Lili
Taylor's last foray into the
genre. Filmed with the Arri Alexa, The Conjuring meanwhile looks cinematic enough
in its 2.40:1, 1080p transfer. Though a HiDef sharpness causes a
bit of cognitive dissonance with the period trappings, it's nominally
preferable to
any kind of pseudo-grit, a little bit of which may have been added to
the
prologue. (At the very least, these introductory scenes were
contrast-boosted
and slightly desaturated.) In bright, daylit scenes, the image
positively
gleams, but the less light there is, the more it's prone to noise, mild
banding
(including colour-banding), and motion trails, all of which are
plausibly
endemic to the source material. Nevertheless, the studio dedicates
little more
than one layer of the BD-50 to the picture proper, and although DP John
R.
Leonetti takes after brother Matthew (who shot Poltergeist)
in vying for
the title of "prince of darkness," shadows are so opaque as to have a
flattening effect that seems undesirable, a by-product of
overcompression.

Included on the disc are three featurettes
of varying levels of silly. "Face to Face with Terror" (7 mins., HD)
interviews the real-life Perrons, focusing on Carolyn Perron née Buchanan, the
woman
played by Taylor. It's extremely cagey with the facts of the real case,
and to
hear Carolyn reflect on the symptoms that overcame her in that allegedly haunted house is to wonder whether she was the victim of misdiagnosed depression. "A Life in Demonology"
(16 mins., HD) finds lots of certified/certifiable occultists
testifying to the
validity of the Warrens' paranormal research. Ed Warren is dead,
unfortunately,
but Louise is alive, available for consulting, and still dressing like a
Victorian
doll, evidently. Speaking of which, the piece teases a glimpse of the
real-life
"Annabelle" then blurs it out, ostensibly to shield our eyes from its
awesome evil but really, as anyone who's bothered to Google the thing knows,
because
it looks comically unmenacing compared to the one in the movie:

Lastly, in "Scaring the @$*% Out of You"
(8 mins., HD), actual human beings say things like "His
artistry
is off the charts!" about director James Wan, who talks like a
teenage girl, turning answers into questions? I didn't know they did
that in
Australia? "I try to think through my own head…" he remarks at one
point. It's kind of a deal-breaker. Still, it's very cool to see the
set, a
two-storey house in the middle of a soundstage. A trailer for We're
the
Millers (HD) cues up on startup; DVD and Ultraviolet copies
of The
Conjuring are included in this combo pack.