The Conjuring

The Conjuring is the best-made studio haunted-house film of the century, and its achievement is entirely craft rather than idea.

There is nothing in the premise you have not seen. Family moves into old house; dog will not come inside; clocks stop at 3:07; the basement is boarded over; a medium arrives. Wan knows you know, and builds the entire film on the assumption. His camera moves when nothing is happening and holds still when something is, which is the opposite of the convention and the reason the scares land. He stages whole sequences in one unbroken take so that you are forced to search the frame yourself — the wardrobe, the sheet, the doorway behind Carolyn's head — and the film's cruellest trick is that it lets you find things before the characters do.

The Warrens are the film's actual subject

Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga play Ed and Lorraine as a working couple who are tired. Their scenes are domestic and unglamorous: paperwork, a daughter, a locked room full of other people's problems, a marriage with an injury in it. Farmiga in particular plays clairvoyance as a chronic condition rather than a gift, and the film's warmth towards them is what separates it from its imitators and from its own sequels.

Lili Taylor's Carolyn Perron is the other half of it. She is a woman who is losing weight, bruising inexplicably and being told it is nothing, and the possession reads first as illness.

The scares are built, not sprung

The clap game in the basement, the music box, the hands on the bedpost, the sheet in the dark, the wardrobe. Every single one is set up earlier as an ordinary household object and then used. Joseph Bishara's score is harsh and string-driven and knows when to stop, which most films of this kind do not.

Where it is thin

Bathsheba herself is a weak antagonist once explained — a witch with a backstory delivered as exposition is less frightening than a boarded cellar. The five daughters are barely differentiated. And the climax turns into a physical fight with an invisible opponent, which is the one point where the film becomes generic.

For Wan's other mode in the same decade, Insidious; for the franchise this film launched, Annabelle and The Nun; for the 1982 studio haunting it is descended from, Poltergeist.

The short answer: Carolyn is fully possessed, takes two of her daughters and drives off, and is found in the house's cellar attempting to stab Christine. Ed performs the exorcism himself, without the Church's authorisation, because there is no time to get it. It fails until Lorraine reaches the woman rather than the entity — she holds Carolyn's face and makes her remember a specific day at the beach with her family. Carolyn breaks free, expels Bathsheba, and the family survives. The closing scene puts the Perrons' music box in the Warrens' artifact room; Lorraine mentions that the Vatican has called with another case.

Who is Bathsheba in The Conjuring?

The film's Bathsheba Sherman is presented as a relative of the accused Salem witch Mary Towne Eastey, who in 1863 sacrificed her week-old child to the Devil, cursed anyone who took her land, and hanged herself from a tree in the yard at 3:07 in the morning. She possesses mothers and makes them kill their children. The 3:07 clock motif, the boarded cellar and the tree outside all trace back to her.

How is the possession broken?

Not by scripture. Ed reads the rite and it does nothing but hurt Carolyn. Lorraine stops him, crouches in front of her and describes a day at the beach — the Perrons' own memory, which Lorraine saw earlier in a vision. Naming something that belongs to Carolyn and not to Bathsheba is what gives her the purchase to expel it. The film's position is that the exorcism works because the woman is still in there.

Why can't the Church help?

Because authorisation takes time the family does not have. The Warrens are told the Perrons are not baptised and that the case needs documentation and a priest, and the paperwork is still moving when Carolyn abducts her daughters. Ed is a demonologist, not a priest, and the film makes clear he is doing something he has no standing to do.

What is the clap game in The Conjuring?

Hide and clap: one player is blindfolded, the others clap to be found. Christine and Nancy play it in the first act, which establishes it as harmless. Later Carolyn is blindfolded in the cellar and something claps from a place where none of her children are standing. It is the single best-engineered scare in the film and it costs nothing — a blindfold and a sound.

Why is Annabelle in this film?

The doll appears in the prologue as an unrelated case and then sits in the Warrens' locked artifact room for the rest of the film. It is doing two jobs: establishing that the Warrens accumulate objects that cannot be destroyed, and seeding a spin-off. Within The Conjuring itself the doll never does anything, which is why it works.

Scored against the published rubric, here is what the numbers mean.

The threat at 012 is near the supernatural floor — only 6 works score lower. There is no human villain anywhere in it, and no reading of the film in which anybody is faking.

Viscera 022 is very low — 21 works score lower. A dead dog, some bruising, a bitten tongue and blood on a knife. Nothing is dwelt on.

Era bias 084 reads modern — 81 works score lower, which is worth stating plainly: the film is set in 1971 but shot with a modern digital grade, a modern sound mix and a modern camera vocabulary. Period setting is not period texture.

Pace 068 is on the shock side, with 89 works slower. It is a film of set pieces with short gaps.

Tone 026 is bleak for a film in which everybody lives — 70 works score lower. The mother is made to try to kill her children and the Warrens go straight to the next case.

Reality anchor 046 is close to the midpoint. The house obeys geography and the rules are consistent; only the cellar sequences bend.

On jump scares: many, and they are superbly made. The wardrobe, the sheet, the clap, the bedposts.