Did The Conjuring: Last Rites Live Up To Its Expectations

The Conjuring: Last Rites arrived in cinemas on September 5th, 2025. Since then, it has stirred plenty of debate, leaving audiences divided about whether the long wait was truly worth the hype and heavy marketing. For years, this franchise has built a reputation for bringing authentic chills to the screen. So when a film is positioned as the final chapter, naturally, expectations rise to impossible heights.

Directed by Michael Chaves, with a screenplay from Ian Goldberg, Richard Naing, and David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick, the film runs for about 135 minutes. It reunites us with familiar faces like Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, and Steve Coulter, while introducing newer talents such as Ben Hardy, Madison Lawlor, and Orlon Smith. With this mix of veteran and fresh cast members, The Conjuring: Last Rites tries to balance nostalgia with reinvention. But whether it succeeds or not is something I carefully unpacked in this review.

Premise

The story begins in 1964, opening with a flashback that immediately ties into Ed and Lorraine Warren’s personal life. Lorraine, heavily pregnant, visits a curio shop where she encounters an antique mirror. A demon reaches through it, touches her, and shocks her into premature labor. The baby appears stillborn, but after Lorraine prays, the child miraculously lives.

Fast-forward twenty-two years, and the Smurl family moves into a home in West Pittston, Pennsylvania. The household is full, with Jack and Janet Smurl living alongside Jack’s parents and their four daughters: Dawn, Heather, and twins Carin and Shannon. Trouble begins innocently enough when Heather receives the antique mirror as a confirmation gift from her grandfather. A dinner scene turns terrifying when the ceiling light crashes down, narrowly missing her. What follows is a cascade of paranormal activity with objects moving, men levitating, voices in the night, all that pushes the Smurls to the edge.

Desperate, Dawn and Heather attempt to rid themselves of the mirror, yet the haunting intensifies. They are soon terrorized by three apparitions: an elderly woman, a younger woman, and a man with an axe. Their story eventually attracts media attention, which in turn reaches Father Gordon.

Meanwhile, the Warrens have their own troubles at home. Judy, their daughter, gets engaged to Tony Spera during Ed’s birthday party. Everything looks joyful, yet both Judy and Lorraine quietly experience strange visions. They choose not to share these experiences with their loved ones, and this secrecy later fuels the emotional core of the film.

Father Gordon eventually visits the Smurls, only to be attacked by the demon and driven to suicide. Judy, being present at Father Gordon’s funeral, touches his coffin and has a vision of his death; she takes it upon herself to investigate in Pennsylvania. Her parents soon follow, reluctantly when Lorraine has a vision of Judy getting hurt.

As events escalate, Lorraine discovers the spirits tormenting the Smurls are merely pawns, masking a far greater demonic presence. Judy is lured into the attic and encounters Annabelle in a chilling cameo that links back to earlier films. Soon, Ed suffers a cardiac episode while Lorraine fights for her life in the basement. The Warrens must make a final stand against an evil force that seems more personal than ever.

The-Conjuring-2_Patrick Wilson_Vera Farmiga

Cast and Performances

Vera Farmiga as Lorraine Warren

Vera continues to embody Lorraine Warren with tenderness and strength. There is something grounding in her presence, her ability to mix vulnerability with determination feels like the emotional anchor of the film. Even though the script doesn’t always give her much to work with, Vera elevates every moment she’s in.

Patrick Wilson as Ed Warren

Patrick Wilson plays Ed with his usual quiet resolve. His chemistry with Vera remains intact, which is a relief because it’s one of the franchise’s strongest elements. However, his subplot with the cardiac scare feels underdeveloped. The emotional weight could have been heavier had the script allowed Ed’s fragility to linger longer on screen.

Madison Lawlor as Young Lorraine

In the opening flashback, Madison Lawlor shines. She mirrors Vera’s mannerisms so closely that the transition feels seamless. For a moment, I even questioned if the scene had been filmed years earlier. It’s a performance that sets the right tone for the film’s beginning, even if later scenes don’t sustain that spark.

Ben Hardy as Tony Spera

Tony is introduced as Judy’s fiancé, a significant new addition to the Warren family. Ben Hardy plays him with caution, almost too much of it. His portrayal often feels like he’s trying to please every character at once, which leaves him seeming inauthentic. While Hardy is undoubtedly talented, his role here felt like a missed opportunity.

Steve Coulter as Father Gordon

Steve Coulter’s performance is one of the highlights. He brings quiet conviction to Father Gordon, embodying the aura of a real priest. His scenes are heartfelt and believable, which makes his death all the more frustrating. Removing him from the story felt like a waste, especially when he had the potential to add more gravitas to the battle with evil.

What I Liked

I cannot overstate how effective the casting was in the opening sequence. The choice of younger actors who so closely resembled Ed and Lorraine genuinely surprised me. That scene alone had me convinced I was about to watch one of the strongest Conjuring films yet.

The soundtrack by Joseph Bishara deserves special recognition. Music has always been a cornerstone of this franchise, and here it compensates for moments where the visual fear falls flat. The sound design carries the dread in ways the performances sometimes couldn’t.

Another positive element was the attention to period detail. From costumes to props, the film convincingly evokes the late 80s and 90s. That authenticity gave the movie texture, grounding the supernatural elements in a world that felt lived-in.

What I Didn’t Like

The most glaring issue lies in the film’s pacing. The way the story wrapped up had no weight, no real essence that suggested deliberate craftsmanship. Can we pause for a moment and just talk about the mirror sequence, because honestly, that was the point where everything unraveled for me. Judy, oh Judy, what a colossal letdown. She carried herself with such detachment, as though she had just received news that her engagement was canceled, rather than confronting something supernatural, and for someone facing an entity of that magnitude, she did a surprisingly meticulous job of concealing it from her parents, which stripped the scene of any urgency.

What grated on me even more was how the acting sank into something hollow, it wasn’t simply flat, it was fractured, with too many characters scattered across the narrative to the point where each sequence felt incongruous, almost like splicing scenes from different films and forcing them to coexist.

Part of the charm of The Conjuring has always been the way it invests time in unmasking the evil, the rituals, the slow unpeeling of identity, the naming of the demon, the sacred details of how it can be confronted. In The Conjuring: Last Rites they were all absent, replaced with something perfunctory, a demon without a name, an enemy with no mythology, which diluted its menace entirely and turned it into little more than a caricature of the franchise’s former horrors

The death of Steve Coulter’s Father Gordon felt not only unnecessary but derivative, as if the writers had no better resolution than to strike down the one character who radiated a sense of quiet authority. How could a nameless, poorly fleshed-out entity defeat Father Gordon, when even the gravest adversaries of earlier films couldn’t touch him, that oversight spoke volumes about the fragility of the writing. And then Judy Warren’s arc, presented as though she were destined to inherit Lorraine’s mantle, only left me baffled. Not every role is meant to be succeeded, some figures remain evergreen, just as Chadwick Boseman’s Black Panther can never be adequately replicated, Vera Farmiga’s Lorraine Warren deserved that same sanctity

The climax, if one can call it that, was shabby in its conflict resolution. The way they decided to neutralize this so-called demon with the vague power of “family” was not only shallow, it was insulting to the intelligence of long-time viewers. I rolled my eyes, not out of cynicism, but out of disappointment, because there were no discernible rules, no logic anchoring the hauntings. Why did some apparitions torment everyone?

And if I could say one last thing to the producers, this: allow your main characters to bear the full consequence of the story, not peripheral ones like Father Gordon. Imagine if Ed or Lorraine had died, the gravitas of that sacrifice would have heightened The Conjuring: Last Rites into something that might have truly felt like a finale worthy of closing the franchise.

Verdict

No, The Conjuring: Last Rites did not meet up to its expectations, I reckon the previous movies in the franchise were more solid than this, I’m not even going to lie, Annabelle, The Nun? Those were scary compared to this.

Regardless, my cup of tea may not be yours, but if you’ve trusted my reviews in the past, you have no reason to doubt this one. Watch The Conjuring: Last Rites if you must, as a matter of fact watch with family and friends, but watch with a lowered expectation, do not expect it to outdo the previous.

The Conjuring: Last Rites has its golden moments, so I would advise you not to miss out on this, considering the fact that the producers gave it a logline that said ‘The case that ended it all.’

My Rating

The Conjuring: Last Rites earns a modest 3 out of 5 stars.

Our Rating of This Movie

Have you seen The Conjuring: Last Rites? Do you think it’s worthy of being the finale?

Author

Amarachi Ndukwe
Amarachi Ndukwe is a talented movie reviewer who knows how to make films easy to understand and fun to discuss. She shares her thoughts in a clear and engaging way, helping her readers see what makes each movie special. With a great eye for detail, she explains stories, themes, and characters in a way that anyone can enjoy.