The Conjuring: Last Rites Review - Love Against the Darkness
There is a moment, late in The Conjuring: Last Rites, when Ed and Lorraine Warren stand side by side, weary but unbowed, staring down the evil that has haunted them for decades. The house is not yet cleansed, the danger not yet vanquished, but you realize that this is the moment the series has always been building toward. Their love, which has overcome cursed dolls, a demon in a nun’s habit, and every trial by fire to come their way, is now the thing that stands between humanity and oblivion.
And in that moment, The Conjuring Universe – after eleven films over the course of twelve years – finally comes full circle.
From the very beginning, James Wan’s The Conjuring announced itself as something more than another haunted house movie. Yes, it had jump scares and ghastly imagery, but what separated it from the countless imitators was the warmth at its center: Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga as a highly fictionalized version of controversial paranormal researchers Ed and Lorraine Warren. In this fantastical telling of the tale, they were not merely monster-hunters, but a married couple whose bond was the real miracle. Time and again in these films, it was their faith – their Catholic faith, yes, but more importantly their faith in each other and in the inherent goodness of humanity – that turned the tide. And over the years, as the franchise expanded into Annabelle, The Nun, and beyond, that beating heart remained. Even in the spinoffs, the lesson endured: evil thrives on division; love survives because it unites.
Last Rites, directed by franchise mainstay Michael Chaves, is not the scariest film in the series, nor the most elegantly constructed. But it is, without question, the most heartfelt since James Wan’s original two films. Like a symphony’s final movement, it plays variations on old themes, revisits familiar motifs, and closes on a note of aching, inevitable resolution.
The Setup
The film begins with a prologue that rewinds the clock to the harrowing birth of the Warrens’ daughter, Judy, in which even the delivery room is not safe from supernatural intrusion. It’s a fitting way to begin this final story: this franchise, for all its demons, has always been about family, about the forces that threaten it and the ties that hold it together. Fast-forward to five years after the previous film, The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, and Ed’s heart condition has essentially forced the Warrens into retirement. Lorraine dotes on her daughter. Ed cracks corny dad jokes. Judy, now grown (Mia Tomlinson), is in love with Tony Spera (Ben Hardy), a man well aware of the shadow her parents cast.
But evil is not finished with the Warrens. In Pennsylvania, the Smurl family begins to experience a haunting that escalates with terrifying speed. By the time the Warrens are drawn back into the fray, what began as a disturbance has become a siege.
The Smurls and the Warrens
Like the Perrons in The Conjuring and the Hodgsons in The Conjuring 2, the Smurls are depicted as ordinary people caught in the extraordinary crossfire of Catholic mythology and demonic terror. The Conjuring Universe may be a fantastical one in which the stories told in ancient religious texts are depicted as real, but the series has always been careful to root its terrors in the mundane: a crooked picture frame, a creaking floorboard, the shriek of a toy. The Smurls are written and played with sincerity, and that sincerity allows the heightened nature of this supernatural horror to feel all the more plausible.
Yet Chaves is less interested this time in escalating the horror than in balancing it against a quieter story: the Warrens in twilight. Scenes of exorcisms and levitations are punctuated by quiet moments at home, where Ed and Lorraine worry over Judy. For the first time in the series, Judy is no longer the innocent child glimpsing horrors from the periphery (Annabelle Comes Home gave us an extensive glimpse into the vulnerability she experienced growing up). Here, she is a young woman forced to confront the legacy her parents cannot escape.
Tomlinson gives Judy a quiet strength, shading her with both vulnerability and defiance. She is the next generation’s answer to the central theme of the series: how do you live with the knowledge of evil without letting it consume you? Her relationship with Tony adds an additional layer: even here, love must endure.
Echoes and Goodbyes
If Last Rites occasionally tips into sentimentality, it is a sentimentality earned. Chaves peppers the film with callbacks – photographs, artifacts, and cameos from the characters who defined past entries. The effect is not cheap nostalgia but acknowledgment: this is the end, at least for now, and the filmmakers want us to feel the weight of goodbye.
When the Warrens finally confront the Smurl haunting, the climax is not about spectacle but about catharsis. The Warrens are forced to reckon not only with the demon in the Smurl home, but with the demons they’ve carried themselves – the toll of years spent staring into the abyss.
And then there’s the final scene. Without spoiling the specifics, suffice it to say that the series ends with a sequence designed to leave no dry eyes. It is not a promise of another sequel, nor a tease for a spinoff. It is closure, plain and simple – a bow tied neatly, lovingly, and finally, followed only by one last serendipitous detail shared after the credits.
The Larger Tapestry
What makes Last Rites work as a finale is how it frames the entirety of The Conjuring Universe. Across eleven films, the franchise has depicted evil in many guises: the Annabelle doll, Valak the demon nun, La Llorona, and even the evil that humans commit against each other. Yet each story has been a variation on the same theme: evil seeks to divide, to isolate, to convince its victims that they are alone. And each resolution has been some variation of love’s endurance.
In Annabelle: Creation, a bond formed between grieving parents and the children who entered their lives offered a sliver of hope. In The Nun II, sisterhood proved stronger than the demonic. In The Conjuring 2, it was Lorraine’s faith in Ed that kept him from plunging to his death. Again and again, the lesson is clear: monsters feed on our fractures, and our strength lies in our connection.
Last Rites brings that idea home. The Warrens, older and frailer, are not the same ghost-chasing couple we met in 2013. But their love is undiminished. And in passing the torch to Judy, the series suggests that the true legacy of the Warrens, as we’ve come to know them in the films, is not their museum of cursed objects or their case files, but the fact that they never let evil drive them apart.
Conclusion
Is The Conjuring: Last Rites the best film in the franchise? No. That honor still belongs to the original The Conjuring, with its perfect blend of gothic atmosphere and primal fear. But Last Rites is, I think, the right film at the right time. Horror franchises rarely know when to quit, and rarer still do they quit with grace. This film knows exactly what it is: an ending. It is not flashy, but it is fitting. It respects its characters, honors its audience, and understands that the true story it has been telling for twelve years is not about demons but about devotion.
As I walked out of the theater, I thought of that first screening of The Conjuring in 2013, when the crowd screamed at the clapping game in the Perron house. We came for the scares. We stayed for this version of Ed and Lorraine. And now, with Last Rites, we say goodbye to them with gratitude.
In a genre built on fear, this franchise dared to insist on something else: that love is the one thing even our demons can’t take away.