Review: In The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, the Soul Isn’t in the Details

The film apes the style that James Wan established with the original Conjuring without establishing any real identity of its own.

The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It
Photo: Warner Bros.

In the Conjuring universe, the reality of God, the devil, and malevolent demons is taken for granted, and mediums, exorcists, and seances are treated with stone-faced seriousness. The franchise’s heroes, paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, may have been flashy showmen prone to self-serving exaggerations in real life, if not outright charlatans, but as played by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga, they’ve been transformed into earnest, good-hearted warriors against the dark forces of evil in this world. But behind the studiously somber façade of the series lies a mischievous tricksterism that takes impish delight in grabbing viewers by the collar and jerking them around for a couple of hours. These films use their po-faced faux-sincerity in the way magicians employ their top hats and capes: as a respectable affectation that masks the vast array of tricks they have up their sleeves.

The scares in the Conjuring universe have rarely been very original, leaning heavily on tried-and-true shocks from the horror pantheon like creepy dolls and gruesome demons, but at their most effective (James Wan’s original The Conjuring and David F. Sandberg’s Annabelle: Creation), the franchise demonstrates that enough formalistic panache can make even the hackiest tropes seem relatively fresh. Michael Chaves’s The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It attempts the same balance of deliberate self-seriousness and audience-jolting set pieces as Wan’s prior two flagship entries in the series, but Chaves lacks the sense of style and formal control to really pull it off. When Wan does one of his trademark Steadicam-heavy sequence shots that glide from room to room, it’s never just for show, as it helps to establish the size and scope of the haunted house at the center of the film at hand. By contrast, when Chaves attempts a similar move in The Devil Made Me Do It, there’s no equivalent payoff. Rather, it establishes spaces that are never used again and, as such, ends up feeling like nothing more than a pointless nod of the head to the Conjuring universe’s house style.

The film announces its lack of inspiration right from the opening sequence in which an exorcism is carried out on eight-year-old David Glatzel (Julian Hilliard). Riffing on the “spider walk” scene from The Exorcist, the sequence also cribs the iconic shot from William Friedkin’s film in which Father Merrin arrives at the MacNeil house in misty silhouette. The influence of Friedkin’s classic, and many a ’70s satanic-horror knock-off that followed in its wake, has always loomed large over the franchise, but there comes a point here where you almost expect Ed and Lorraine to investigate the film itself for potential intellectual property theft.

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The story of The Devil Made Me Do It, like that of its predecessors, is loosely derived from one of the Warrens’ real-life cases, only this time there’s a slightly unseemly quality to the mix of truth and fiction. In the film’s telling, the Warrens are called up to Connecticut to document David’s exorcism, during which the demonic force is transferred to his older sister’s boyfriend, Arne Johnson (Ruairi O’Connor). Arne, in thrall to the evil spirit, later murders his landlord, Bruno Sauls (Ronnie Gene Blevins), in a confused rage when he catches Bruno dancing to Blondie’s “Call Me” with his girlfriend, Debbie (Sarah Catherine Hook). After he’s arrested, Arne pleads not guilty to the murder by reason of demonic possession, and the Warrens, convinced that he’s telling the truth, attempt to find evidence to prove him right.

Everything is rigidly black and white in the Conjuring universe, so there’s no question that Bruno’s murder was orchestrated by a demon. But in the real world, Arne Johnson really did kill a man (actually named Alan Bono) and attempted to evade conviction, with the help of the Warrens, by claiming a spirit made him do it. Whatever the truth of the case, The Devil Made Me Do It shows little compunction about incorporating this very real tragedy and the Warrens’ media-stoking satanic-possession narrative into its own mythology. The invocation of the Bono murder is particularly discomfiting because Chaves takes such great pains to elide its brutality. We see Bruno through Arne’s woozy, possessed eyes, in which he appears as a monstrous attacker, but Chaves never shows us the slaying itself because depicting it might cause the audience to lose sympathy for him. The effect is to transform a real-life killer into an innocent dupe while turning his victim, at least momentarily, into a beast.

Handled with a touch of subtlety or nuance, the murder might have been easier to take, but Chaves’s approach throughout The Devil Made Me Do It is like a sledgehammer in its heavy-handedness. That works well enough during some of the film’s spooky set pieces, which, in classic Conjuring fashion, are doled out at a regular clip. One sequence set in a morgue, in which the Warrens are attacked by an overweight, demonically possessed corpse is playfully hammy, and a shot of a ghastly visage appearing in a waterbed achieves just the right balance of creepiness and silliness. Other scares, though, such as a grisly vision softly singing “Call Me,” come off as simply goofy, and the inevitable climactic confrontation between the Warrens and the demon they’ve been pursuing is merely chaotic and loud.

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With the template for the Conjuring movies already well-established, The Devil Made Me Do It isn’t interested in deviating from the mold. Rather, Chaves is content to simply hammer away at what works, aping the style that Wan established with the original film without establishing any real identity of his own. The result is a film that feels cynical and at times even dreary. For all its grim religiosity, The Devil Made Me Do It fundamentally lacks a soul.

Score: 
 Cast: Patrick Wilson, Vera Farmiga, Ruairi O’Connor, Sarah Catherine Hook, Julian Hilliard, John Noble, Eugenie Bondurant, Shannon Kook, Ronnie Gene Blevins  Director: Michael Chaves  Screenwriter: David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick  Distributor: Warner Bros.  Running Time: 112 min  Rating: R  Year: 2021  Buy: Video, Soundtrack

Keith Watson

Keith Watson is the proprietor of the Arkadin Cinema and Bar in St. Louis, Missouri.

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