TL;DR: The Conjuring: Last Rites is a safe, dated farewell to the Warrens. Solid performances, stale scares, and no surprises. Strictly for fans who want one last comforting jump before the lights go out.

There’s a certain smell that hits you when you walk into a multiplex in early September. Not the hot-buttered-popcorn kind—that’s evergreen—but the faint tang of cinematic leftovers. The summer blockbusters have burned themselves out, the festival darlings haven’t yet crossed the Atlantic, and the horror franchises tend to sneak in here, hoping to catch us off-guard as the nights start closing in. And so it was with The Conjuring: Last Rites, the latest—and, if we believe the marketing, the final—chapter in James Wan’s exorcist extended universe. I walked into it with that peculiar cocktail of resignation and morbid curiosity: the feeling you get when an old band announces one last tour. You don’t expect reinvention. You just want to see whether the riffs still work.

The Conjuring movies have always been a strange beast for me. I was there back in 2013 when the first one dropped, and I remember vividly how it felt like horror cinema was still clawing its way out of the mid-2000s graveyard of Saw sequels and found-footage fatigue. Wan’s neat trick was nostalgia—he dusted off the old haunted-house tropes, repolished the furniture, and sold us on the idea that bump-in-the-night scares could still raise your pulse if they were framed like a 1970s TV movie. It was retro, sure, but it had craft. And it had Ed and Lorraine Warren—played with disarming sincerity by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga—anchoring the hokum with the kind of earnestness you don’t often get in movies that throw ghost nuns at your face.

Last Rites, though, lands in 2025 with a far heavier burden. Horror right now is mutating faster than Marvel can kill off multiverses. We’ve got A24 giving us high-art pagan dread, Jordan Peele reinventing social thrillers, and Shudder pumping out microbudget oddities that feel more alive than anything with a studio logo. Against that backdrop, Last Rites is… well, dad-rock horror. Imagine going to a festival where everyone’s buzzing about hyperpop and AI DJs, and then Status Quo shuffle on stage to do another 12-bar blues. Competent, familiar, and just the wrong kind of comforting.

The film plants us in 1986, which should feel like fertile ground for retro spookery. Ghostbusters has just captured the cultural zeitgeist; VHS tapes are rotting on bedroom shelves; Stephen King’s name is printed on every third paperback in the airport. But instead of diving into that weird, neon-soaked era of American horror, Last Rites serves us beige suburbia with a side of Reagan-era wallpaper. Ed and Lorraine, now firmly middle-aged, are treated almost as cultural fossils. There’s a nicely played prologue where we see them as young parents, but the main narrative leans hard into their square-ness. They are yesterday’s exorcists, mocked by students, gently patronized by a culture that’s already traded candlelit séances for proton packs. The irony is that this movie itself feels like it hasn’t noticed the shift either.

The supposed centerpiece is a Pennsylvanian household with an antique mirror that doubles as a portal to hell. On paper, that sounds like a perfect throwback set-piece, a chance to riff on everything from Poltergeist to Candyman. But the movie takes its sweet time—seventy-five minutes, give or take—before the horror engine really starts. Before that, it’s soap opera: the Warrens’ daughter Judy planning her wedding, family dinners, long conversations about faith and marriage that circle the drain until the next scripted jump scare arrives. I don’t begrudge character work in horror; in fact, it’s often what makes the scares land. But here it feels like filler, as though the filmmakers know we’ve seen all these tricks before and are stalling for the inevitable basement descent.

And when the scares do arrive? Well, they’re the same scares you’ve already bought twice over. There’s another creepy doll lurking in the margins. The demon makeup looks like it was pulled out of a Linda Blair cosplay convention. And of course, there’s the staircase scene—because what is a Conjuring movie without someone creeping up dark steps while violins screech on the soundtrack? These flourishes once carried a charge, but by now the floorboards don’t just creak—they wheeze.

The saving grace, as ever, is Wilson and Farmiga. They’ve become the franchise’s steady heartbeat, and even in a movie this sluggish, they manage to infuse their scenes with a kind of weary warmth. They are, ironically, the squarest thing about these films—and that’s what keeps them watchable. When Ed holds Lorraine’s hand mid-exorcism, you believe in their bond more than you believe in the horned demon snarling in the corner. It’s domestic melodrama dressed up as spiritual warfare, and maybe that’s why audiences kept showing up. The Conjuring universe has always been less about terror than reassurance: the idea that love and prayer can banish any darkness, provided you have the right rosary beads and a stern glare.

The soundtrack tries to juice up the nostalgia with Howard Jones, but it’s telling that the whole movie feels older than its setting. The 1980s should feel neon, gaudy, excessive. Instead, Last Rites plays like it’s trapped in the Victorian parlor where it left its first Ouija board. There’s no sense of horror evolving, no acknowledgment of the wild experiments happening just outside the frame. It’s as if the franchise built a time capsule in 2013 and never bothered to climb out.

So where does that leave us? Honestly, in a strangely fitting place. If this truly is the end of the Warrens’ cinematic adventures, then it’s an appropriately square send-off. Last Rites doesn’t disgrace the franchise, but it doesn’t energize it either. It’s a film content to shuffle through the motions one last time before heading to bed with a cup of warm milk. The Conjuring was once a reminder that horror could be classic and crowd-pleasing at the same time. Now it feels like a relic, comforting only to those who don’t want their scares too messy or too modern.

Final Verdict:

The Conjuring: Last Rites closes the curtain on the Warrens with a shrug rather than a scream. Wilson and Farmiga remain compelling anchors, but the film itself is a sluggish, predictable march through well-worn territory. In a horror landscape that’s constantly mutating, this feels like dad-rock: reliable, square, and a little embarrassing to admit you still listen to.