Believe the marketing, and Michael Chaves’ 2025 horror film The Conjuring: Last Rites marks the final instalment of the hugely successful Warner Bros franchise. Of course any viewer of American horror knows that is almost certainly a lie: given time there will inevitable be another remake, reboot, or sequel, since horror franchises seem as impossible to kill as their supernatural antagonists. That this fourth film in the series has also been the most commercially successful suggests there will be more to come. To be honest I kind of hope there is a fifth film some time in the next few years; this is a deeply mediocre effort with which to end things.

The Conjuring series is based around the real-life self-proclaimed demonologist Ed Warren and his supposedly psychic wife Lorraine. It has always been a slightly uncomfortable basis for a film franchise, since the actual Warrens were deluded fools at best and cynically exploitative con artists at worst. Their supposed supernatural encounters have been widely debunked and criticised, yet Warner Bros has happily paid for an entire franchise of sequels and spin-offs based on their names. For me, at least, it has always left a somewhat sour taste. These films are claimed to be “based on a true story”, but it’s a particularly disreputable kind of truth – if there is indeed any truth there at all.

That’s honestly a shame, because in the hands of James Wan – who directed the first two and produced the third and fourth – these films have enjoyed some of the strongest and visually effective ghosts, demons, and otherworld phenomenon of recent genre cinema. Wan has a real knack for it, whether here or in other films and franchises like Saw, Insidious, and Malignant. There is some palpably awesome supernatural horror to be found in Last Rites; sadly it is not all there is for viewers to find.

The film picks up on the Warrens (played by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) well into the 1980s: effectively retired and lecturing to rapidly declining audiences on their demon-hunting exploits. Their daughter Judy (Mia Tomlinson) is slowly becoming afflicted by supernatural forces, which her parents fear and which boyfriend Tony (Ben Hardy) does not comprehend. Meanwhile over in Pennsylvania, a working class family fall under the influence of a malevolent force that terrorises them in their own home.

This is very much a film in the format of the first two Conjurings: a family living in terror, people getting possessed, and the Warrens wading in with a combination of old-fashioned values and religious fervour to save the day. So far, so good, only it takes more than half of the 135-minute running time to bring the film’s two halves together. One half is precisely what the audience has come for: ghostly thrills, scary moments, and a creepy atmosphere. The other half wastes a lot of the audience’s time with Judy and Tony’s blossoming romance, Ed’s fears over his failing heart, and familial regret over abandoning their dangerous ghost-busting careers in favour of a safe retirement.

It is a struggle for the audience to care, and if there is a single mistake that Last Rites makes it is that it mistakenly believes it is a love for the Warrens that has pulled the audience through the franchise and not simply a healthy love for a scary movie. I strongly suspect the majority of viewers do not really care about Ed and Lorraine Warren. They have always been somewhat one-dimensional, blandly conservative, and relatively humourless. While Wilson and Farmiga have consistently played them very well, they have always functioned as cyphers to enable the haunted families to escape trauma. Certainly I do not particularly care for the Warrens; to be completely honest, I am uncertain I have ever even liked the Warrens. They seem to be based on genuinely terrible people. I – and I suspect much of the audience – watches The Conjuring for a creepy ghost or demonic presence instead.

This is a film that drags. This is a film that squanders its time on bland family drama and nostalgia, and does it so egregiously that by the time the actual plot finally kicks in it was difficult to care. The apparent “final” Conjuring movie is also the least effective of them. It feels like a chore.