James Wan’s The Conjuring series has persisted as something of a contradiction. Its immense size — 10 total films if you include 2019’s The Curse of La Llorona, which seems to be a minor matter of inconsequential debate — belies a series that, unlike similarly large franchises such as Marvel or DC, really succeeds as intimate reflections on faith and family. It’s not hard to see why the Conjuring films in particular have been so popular: These are Catholic stories in which fundamentally good people are challenged to keep their souls intact in a world where God and the devil are not abstractions but real forces in our material world.
Spooky toys, cursed dolls and horned beasts notwithstanding, The Conjuring is, rather hokily, about the power of love to ward off the specter of evil. And emblematic of that power has always been Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga, respectively). While the real-life Warrens undoubtedly were hucksters and snake-oil salesmen, the fictional ones are an intensely likable couple whose love for each other is far firmer than the veil between the living and the dead.
For fans of the series, then, the opening scrawl for Last Rites seems, at first glance, pretty chilling. The fourth film promises a story that is so “devastating” to the lives of the Warrens that they are forced out of the limelight, ending their careers. Given that the real-life Warrens lived well into their old age, and their daughter Judy Spera now runs her own company for paranormal investigation (and, further, that the film has been heavily marketed as the final film for the fictional Warrens), the scrawl does seem a bit tepid at best.
Despite something of a false opening promise, Last Rites is appropriately terrifying, far more successful on a scare-by-scare basis than the second or third films and a really frothy return to the aesthetic pleasures of Wan’s first Conjuring. Screenwriters Ian B. Goldberg, Richard Naing & David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick smartly return us to the question of the Warrens’ viability as a family unit, asking, for the first time in the franchise, what the psychological toll might be — not just for Ed and Lorraine but for their daughter, Judy (Mia Tomlinson), too. This is, after all, a lifetime spent intimately handling the ghosts, demons and murderous spirits.
The film begins the night of Judy’s birth, in 1964, when a young Ed and Lorraine (Orion Smith and Madison Lawlor, respectively) extricate themselves from a possible exorcism of a bizarre oversized mirror, race to the hospital and revive a dead Judy through the power of prayer. The scene offers the difficult possibility that their daughter is potentially cursed, or that, even worse, Lorraine potentially has offered up Judy’s soul to the devil in exchange for long life.
For much of the film, that enticing idea undergirds the main plot line like a ticking time bomb. Director Michael Chaves, in a much more successful and affecting fashion than his previous outputs for the franchise, builds a tightly knotted tension through effective foreshadowing and with several complex Rube Goldberg machines. Last Rites is based on the supposed haunting of the Smurl family home in West Pittston, PA, from 1974-89, a haunting that resulted in a media storm and a book that was co-authored by the Warrens. As the couple investigates the possible possession, they also prepare to welcome Judy’s fiancée Tony (Ben Hardy) into the family.
As with any other Conjuring film, the details of the “why” are less important than the mechanics of the haunting itself, and Chaves and company dispense with the investigatory detective work that hampered The Devil Made Me Do It in favor of a series of genuinely spooky set pieces. They also importantly tie together the Warren’s own experiences with that of the Smurl family, which gives this chapter a more personal and, sure, “devastating” feel than what has come before it.
In a series that is admirably earnest, Last Rites easily takes the cake as the most wholesome chapter of the bunch, its insistence on God and faith teetering on religious propaganda. But the approach is undoubtedly effective, with a climax that is as scary as it is emotionally resonant. In a way that has not always been true of The Conjuring, many of the film’s scariest moments are tied seamlessly to the emotional stakes of the characters. A scene in which Judy is being pursued by a ghostly presence while she tries on wedding dresses in front of an infinity mirror is amongst the franchise’s most breathtaking scares, and let’s just say that there’s another exquisitely jarring scene with a recurring character later in the film that is a masterful manipulation.
All of these moments culminate in a question that has rested in the center of all 10 films of the extended universe: Is it better to shut out the ghosts of the past through sheer force of will or to stare them in the face in fearless confrontation? For Ed, Lorraine and perhaps especially Judy, it is a question that is poised to haunt them either into the next stage of life, or beyond the mirror’s false reflection, into the death trap of the undiscovered country.
Title: The Conjuring: Last Rites
Distributor: Warner Bros
Release date: September 5, 2025
Director: Michael Chaves
Screenwriters: Ian Goldberg, Richard Naing, David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick
Cast: Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Mia Tomlinson, Ben Hardy, Steve Coulter, Rebecca Calder, Elliott Cowan, Kíla Lord Cassidy, Beau Gadsdon, John Brotherton, Shannon Kook
Rating: R
Running time: 2 hr 15 mins
