If anyone was wondering where I was the past couple weeks, not churning out reviews, I was in Norway and Sweden. Seeing fjords and not movies. So now that I’m back, what better way to celebrate the stunning beauty of these northern nations, the amazing vistas of nature, the crazy viking history, the shifting monarchies, and the forgotten heritage attached to the world than to see James Wan’s film The Conjuring. He made Saw.

But what is life if not a series of different experiences. And I must say The Conjuring is different than other experiences similar in content. Let’s start with this, I didn’t like Saw. I thought it was poorly acted, hammy boredom with a twist I didn’t care for. In the interim Wan has improved. He has made a name of himself with more creepy, relatively inexpensive horror films, none of which I’ve seen. But also a remake of Death Wish called Death Sentence that I found straight forwardly brutal and fascinating. He continues this plain attitude in The Conjuring which is not an amazing film but is unreasonably entertaining nonetheless.

What is so difficult? We. Fight. Ghosts.

Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga star as Ed and Lorraine Warren, paranormal investigators who specialize in ridding people of their ghost problems. Based on a true story that I knew nothing about in advance, they are called in to help a family and their five daughters. Ron Livingston is father Roger Perron, married to Lili Taylor‘s Carolyn Perron. They are worried after moving into an old farm house that has a secret cellar, clocks that stop at 3:07am, invisible friends their youngest talks to, and a world of random bruises that keep showing up on Carolyn’s body. I don’t think their home inspector did a very good job telling them to buy this place. I hope they got a discount. I wonder what a multiple murder, satanic backstory to a house can get you in coupons.

Let’s get this out of the way. All the acting in this film is spot on. Even the slightly over the top cop played by John Brotherton with fun comic timing. Ron Livingston is wonderfully plain and appropriately afraid. Lili Taylor has the most dynamic role, ranging from sweet motherly joy to emotional terror and you feel for her in this ordeal. Patrick and Vera evoke a calm, steady presence of confidence and intelligence. Even the kids balanced their screen time by just living on the stage given. Never going further than was needed.

And that’s the main strength of The Conjuring. It’s very straightforward. Rather than hype the paranormal nature of what the Warren’s do for a living, Wan smartly just plays them as people who aren’t looking for a quick buck. He even takes time to show them in one scene debunking supposed ghost hauntings as just wind and creaky wood. Whilst I’m not a believer in ghosts and think professional psychic hunters are just money grubbing charlatanes, Wan doesn’t focus on that. He assumes stuff is real and allows them to honestly help people in terrible situations.

Math 108 is down the hall.

However I don’t agree with the Warren’s decision to keep all the possessed items from their trade, sitting in their house. It just seems like a bad idea, what with a kid in the house and all those sharp cornered curses and stuff. It seems that while the Warrens believe in ghosts, they don’t believe in Feng Shui. 

How straightforward is this movie? Well sometimes the directness acts as its biggest weakness, as when dialogue clunks along like a cliff notes of greater speeches. It’s so straightforward that nuance is gone and sometimes interchanges are reduced to nothing. In an attempt to describe the level the dialogue sometimes hits, I did some research with Yahoo Answers and was able to reduce the Gettysburg Address to this: “the dead have not died in vain and it is up to rest of you to redouble your effort to rejoin the Union and put the rebellion down.”  Imagine if that’s what Lincoln had said, quickly getting the main point out of the way so he could call it a night to play some bridge with his wife. (Great thanks to a man named Yak Rider for the this summary.)

But when the straightforwardness works it really works. The Warrens are professionals at this ghost stuff and when the demonic insanity and danger really ratchet up they have zero problem running right in with no qualms. Even falling through two stories of walls to face certain death doesn’t stop Lorraine from her goal of kicking psychic butt. It drives the tension through the roof. Surprisingly though, the most tense moments are the simplest.

Quick, is anyone else floating on the ceiling?

One of the daughters sleepwalks and bangs her head into an armoire that came with the house multiple nights in a row. Creepy stuff. Pumping it up even further are fun camera tricks. I was reminded of Paranormal Activity 3, with the camera on a fan, rotating back and forth. Sometimes Wan moves the camera loosely around to give a first person perspective. Sometimes he rotates it completely upside down to add to the surreal disorientation and creep factor. And other times he just leaves it plain and follows events around directly. It’s all in service of the atmosphere. He knows it’s all fun and games too because instead of punctuating scary moments with a musical sting, he waits until the moment is over and brings in the overwrought, strange music, as an interlude between vignettes. It’s bizarre and silly but it works.

Despite the failings, the silly music, or the distracting, periodic dialogue dumbness, The Conjuring delivers the fun, the scares, and the audience experience you want. Throughout, my audience was giggling, yelling, tossing dialogue at the screen, and wondering why they enjoyed being manipulated so much.

Where’s my carpeting!

Here’s the final deal. I don’t like being scared. It’s not something I look for in a film. But some of my favorite films are horror movies because good atmosphere, acting, story, and fun can be had in any genre. The Conjuring has all of that. And thus I am happy I went.