Shared Horror
Why see “The
Conjuring?” Because respectable critics have written reams of praise saying
variously that it is gripping, fast paced, and studded with good acting. One
even called it “the best suspense movie of this year.” After seeing it – or most
of it - what lingers is astonishment that anyone would choose to go to a movie
with full knowledge that they will be terrified for nearly two hours. Suspense
is one thing, terror quite another. But that says only that some people love
horror films just as others love westerns, or musicals or family dramas. I am
not one of them.
With that
confession, I can also say that yes, the acting is good. Vera Farmiga is
particularly effective as Lorraine, wife of Ed (Patrick Wilson). She is
clairvoyant, he is a searcher. Together, they try to help people who are
threatened by other worldly activity – but only those in desperate need since
Ed’s wife met some terrible fate on an earlier job. Lorraine and Ed meet Carolyn
(Lili Taylor) and Roger (Ron Livingston) who, take my word for this, will need
their help very soon.
Carolyn and
Ed, you see, have bought an abandoned, isolated, rural wreck of a house to live
in with their five daughters. It comes, of course, complete with a nightmare of
a cellar and the recurrent sounds and actions of the former owners. The twist
here is that the unwelcome lingerers are not ghosts in the usual sense. Ghosts
at least are external threats. These abstract beings have the ability to burrow
into a living person, to become an evil part of the people they choose to
inhabit so the others don’t know who it is who walks among them.
Beyond
setting this stage, there’s very little to say because my eyes were closed most
of the time and my ears were covered nearly to the point of bruising. Here’s the
problem: the music. It’s the music that sets in motion the inner certainty of
impending doom. At that point I began to understand that the audience, while
pretending to calm, had become a terrified collective in a state of shared
reaction. The man in front of me leaned on the arm of his seat so the hand
covering his ear would appear to be a casual pose instead of a defensive act
against the violence unreeling on the thirty foot screen.
Accuse me of
being a coward, but not of being dishonest. When, twenty minutes before the end,
the certainty of escalation became clear, my movie pal nodded toward the exit, I
nodded yes and we bolted – an inexcusable move for a reviewer of movies. But I
promise you that no matter what happened in the last twenty minutes that I
didn’t see, fans of the horror genre will indeed gain an enormously satisfying
shot of summer fear. If terror is a measure of your pleasure, this one is a 9.5.
Copyright (c) Illusion