The Conjuring (2013)
– Though the words “from the director of Saw”
might give viewers pause, the truth is that James Wan actually turns in the
strongest work of his career with this retro-exorcist horror film that both
unsettles and goes for the full jump moment.
Ron Livingston and Lili Taylor play a married couple who move into a
seemingly haunted house; as the supernatural occurrences grow more dire, they
contact paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and
Vera Farmiga) to banish the malicious spirits possessing their home. Usually typecast as milquetoast, Wilson
musters up instead a stalwart and defensive skeptic pushed beyond his expertise. Farmiga, who’s doing career-best work over on
AMC’s Bates Motel as Norman’s loopy
mother, plays a very convincing empathy who connects with the demonic spirit in
frightening ways where the disquiet is superbly evident on her face. Fortunately, The Conjuring suffers from none of the overacting or hacky clichés
that often plague horror films; while the film does venture into moments we’ve
seen before, the execution really sticks the landing in terms of genuinely
unnerving the audience. I’ll be honest
and disclose that the exorcism subgenre of horror freaks me out more than most
(second only, perhaps, to home invasion narratives), and the success of The Conjuring is that it’s immersive in
the way of the best horror films – that is, it successfully eclipses your
surroundings to the point where you’ll forget there’s a real world outside the
film, allowing the mounting dread and inevitable punctuations of fright to
pervade into your soul. While I’m not
sure that lightning can strike twice in these cases, I’ll be in line for The Conjuring 2 (2015).
Mama (2013) – Hitchcock
famously said that the true terror is in the anticipation and not in the bang;
by his logic, Mama is a highly
successful horror film, but the rest of us will likely find ourselves disappointed
by the way Mama handles “the bang” in
the last twenty or so minutes of the film.
Jessica Chastain and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau star as the adoptive parents
of two girls found in a feral state five years after their father abducted
them, though it quickly becomes apparent that the girls’ invisible friend “Mama”
has sinister intentions for the new parents.
Where The Conjuring crafted a
compelling climactic possession sequence, Mama
fails maintain its momentum at its narrative summit, in part because it
discloses too much about the supernatural goings-on. Mama
is at its best when the spidery phantoms are unexplained, when the film’s
visual language tells us that something is viciously awry (as in one brilliantly
directed moment depicting what seems to be the girls at play – until we realize
that one of the figures in the playroom isn’t human). I even forgive the film its disclosure of
who/what Mama really is, though what it does with that reveal leads it into
some bizarre territory that takes a hard left from deft horror into something
more at home in a Guillermo del Toro fantasy tale. Chastain is gifted as Annabel, playing against
type as a wannabe punk rocker; she’s suitably distressed by the haunting
happenings, and her burgeoning affection for the girls is engaging. But Mama
forsakes its scarier moments when it sprints toward a conclusion that conforms
to its own internal logic but is, beyond the borders of the film, likely to
leave audiences asking, “Whaaa?”That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!
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