Annabelle: Creation (2017)

Annabelle: Creation (2017)

IMDB Rating : 6.9/10 (as on 17.09.2017)

R | 1h 49min | Horror, Mystery, Thriller

12 years after the tragic death of their little girl, a dollmaker and his wife welcome a nun and several girls from a shuttered orphanage into their home, where they soon become the target of the dollmaker's possessed creation, Annabelle.

Director: David F. Sandberg

Writers: Gary Dauberman

Stars: Anthony LaPaglia, Samara Lee, Miranda Otto

IMDB link here

Movie rating ★☆☆☆☆ 

 Same old devil doll, same old clichés

Peter Bradshaw

Yet another tiresome film in the formulaic and metastasising devil-doll horror franchise that started with The Conjuring and its sequel The Conjuring 2, notionally inspired by real-life paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren. Annabelle: Creation is, heartsinkingly, a prequel to the prequel that was Annabelle (2014), which gave the glassy-eyed Victorian doll from The Conjuring its own backstory.

Now we are back in some sub-Little-House-on-the-Demonic-Prairie era, with Anthony LaPaglia playing Mr Samuel Mullins, a doll-maker in a huge house in the midwestern middle of nowhere. It’s a profession that he makes as utterly silly and unbelievable as it sounds.

Miranda Otto is stuck with the role of simpering wife and mom to their little girl who meets a tragic accident, and whose tormented spirit is hijacked by the devil who uses one of the dolls to get a foothold on earth. Then the house gets used as an orphanage for girls for all ages. It’s the same old jump scares, the same old deafening audio stabs – the same old cliches and dull, lazy secondhand ideas.

 Read full review at The Guardian

Movie rating ★★☆☆☆ 

 'Derelict'

Tim Robey

Last year’s horror hit The Conjuring featured a cameo for a sinister Victorian doll, called Annabelle, shut behind glass by the ghost-hunting couple whose exploits we were following. Annabelle’s function was minimal in The Conjuring, though, and the efforts made to introduce her seem all the more shameless in this slightly derelict spinoff.

Expectant couple Mia (coincidental namesake Annabelle Wallis) and John (Ward Horton) get it worst. It’s 1967, and the only thing missing in their nursery is an antique doll to complete the set: heeeere’s Annabelle! Removed from wrapping, she’s so obviously demonic as to make the unfazed cooing of her new owners a laugh-out-loud bit of business.

Had they only waited a year, they might have noticed that their characters have the same names as the leads from Roman Polanski’s film Rosemary’s Baby (1968), and rushed straight to an abortion clinic. Annabelle quickly sets about meddling with their contentment.

Their next-door neighbours, in another odd reference to Polanski, are slaughtered in the night by their cult-fanatic daughter and her Charles Manson-like mentor. Mia is stabbed in the side when these psychos pop next door, but the baby is miraculously unharmed.

Cinematographer-turned-director John R Leonetti shot The Conjuring and the Insidious films, and should probably have hired himself in that capacity, as this mostly looks cheap and nasty. Every expense, basically, has been spared that might have imbued Annabelle with formidable qualities as an agent of evil. She’s just a glorified prop, an excuse for bad things to happen to uninteresting people.

 Read full review at Telegraph

In ‘Annabelle: Creation,’ Orphans Are Child’s Play for a Doll

JEANNETTE CATSOULIS

“Annabelle: Creation” is the third cinematic outing for the demon-hosting doll of the title, after a guest spot on “The Conjuring” in 2013 and a star turn the next year in “Annabelle.” The narratives lurch backward, with each film acting as a prequel to its predecessor. Should this trend continue, we could very well see one of Annabelle’s ancestors causing catastrophic delays in the building of the pyramids.

Gary Dauberman’s script is lamentably light on mythological details (can the demon survive indefinitely outside the doll, or does it have a curfew?), but its vacuousness allows the director, David F. Sandberg, to string together jolts any way he pleases.

As with last year’s “Lights Out,” he proves a master of the flash-scare, a nifty choreographer of precipitous timing and striptease visuals. But he’s also adroit with more leisurely horrors, like the snap-crackle-pop of the murderous shade flexing for the kill, or the slow animation of a sacklike scarecrow into a toothy obscenity.

In this kind of horror movie, no one ever seems to hear you scream.

Read full review at New York times

Movie rating ★★★★☆ 

Creation’ is scary good

Michael O'Sullivan

If we have learned anything from the Cooking Channel, it’s that talent isn’t defined by the ingredients you use but what you do with them. By that measure, director David F. Sandberg is an alchemist of the first order, taking the base — even leaden — components of horror and whipping them into a shivery chiffon of dread. The Swedish filmmaker did it with his debut feature, “Lights Out,” which milked a deceptively simple, yet sublimely spooky premise — the boogeyman only appears when the lights go out, and vanishes as soon as they’re back on — for all it was worth. And he has done it again — with even cheesier material — taking the cliche-filled pantry of the devil-doll prequel “Annabelle: Creation” and turning out a dish that, while pulled together from the familiar components of the ghost story, is uncommonly, nerve-rackingly satisfying.

The recipe Sandberg uses is one we’ve seen before, mixing bits and pieces from a screenplay by Gary Dauberman (who also wrote the much less effective “Annabelle,” a 2014 spinoff from the universe of “The Conjuring”). The 1950s-set tale, which centers on orphans living in a remote, sprawling house, complete with balky electricity, a drafty dumbwaiter and an abundance of secret crawl ­spaces, also features: a locked room; a dead child; a well; a reclusive invalid who wears a “Phantom of the Opera”-style half-mask; and, for crying out loud, a nightmarish scarecrow.

None of this is new, and in lesser hands it would easily become tedious. But Sandberg knows how to ratchet up suspense, composing shots filled with beautiful shadows, in whose corners there always seems to be lurking something scary: a ghostly little girl; a doll that looks like the spawn of Howdy Doody and Bette Davis in “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?”; and something far more sinister.

“The Conjuring” is a good movie. Its sequel, not so much. “Annabelle,” which took a small part of those films’ world — a prop, really — and expanded on it, was an uninspired first crack at injecting some life into the trope of the demon doll. It didn’t work.

On paper, “Annabelle: Creation” shouldn’t work either. But to be fair, what horror movie doesn’t sound stupid when you talk about it? Horror works — or it doesn’t — in the flickering, moving images of the screen, not the page. Sandberg knows that. His artistry, for that’s what it is, is like that of the dollmaker Sam Mullins: to take inert material and create a living, breathing thing.

Read full review at Washington post

Toying with fear

Deborah Cornelious

There are very few horror films that eschew the reckless behaviour of its characters like The Babadook (2014) and Under the Shadows (2016). If something is going bump in the night, you do not bravely go check it out. When that door is locked, it ought to stay that way. Annabelle: Creation is not one of those films. The film’s characters dance on every last nerve. They revel in and then regret doing what they shouldn’t. This pretty much shapes the latest installment of The Conjuring series.

The premise isn’t terribly original: an old haunted house is the perfect receptacle for sinister paranormal activities. David F. Sandberg -- known for his successfully scary Lights Out (2016) -- brings his expertise to the arena. There are some predictable frights and Sandberg knows how to stretch one thrill into a million with deft camerawork. Without realising it, you’ll often hold your breath. An eerie soundtrack -- including an old world rendition of ‘You are my Sunshine’ only amplifies the atmosphere that Sandberg creates.

Despite what works in Annabelle: Creation’s favour, the film can get predictable, often even descending into camp. In one scene, a panicked character rushes to tighten a bulb when a reanimated scarecrow is advancing toward her. Plus, you can look the demon square in the eye without a single wince. And this writer is a coward when it comes to horror films. Not revealing the evil would have been a far more effective route. As for the performances, only Bateman is brilliant, transforming from the meek and modest orphan into possessed Janice out for blood. No one else stands out enough.

In The Conjuring universe, Annabelle: Creation is the weakest link riding on the success of its previous films. It certainly answers the demon doll’s origin story, but it does so with unnecessary froth. Hopefully, The Nun which comes out next year can do better.

Read full review at The Hindu

Movie rating ★★☆☆☆ 

 This Conjuring spin-off disappoints

Shalini Langer

PARENTS frightened of their own child have sustained many a horror film. A malevolent spirit in a child’s doll many others. We needn’t look further than even The Conjuring, of which Annabelle: Creation is the fourth spin-off, and the prequel to a prequel. Yeah, by now, they should have this pat down. Annabelle: Creation has all that, plus a desolate house, orphans, nun, a mysterious woman behind a curtain, a forbidden door, a scarecrow, a barn, a basement, a chair lift, a lift hidden behind a wall, a well, and lots and lots of dolls. Who needs a story, or even one character that does things besides opening strange doors?

Sometime in the early 1940s, a doll-maker and his wife, Samuel (LaPaglia) and Esther (Otto) Mullins, lose their young daughter to an accident. They sequester themselves in their old, rickety farmhouse, away from all civilization, along with their grief, the doll Annabelle (named after their daughter) and “something else”. Twelve years later, to this house arrives a nun (Sigman) with six girls, her wards at an orphanage that has shut down. One of the girls, Janice (Bateman), is polio-afflicted, and left on her own by the other girls, starts exploring the house with its many secrets and strange happenings.

Then the happenings never cease, with director Sandberg (Lights Out) deploying largely the same tricks. The questions we want answered are never asked. So, we know nothing of the nun, but for the titillating detail that she was once at a “Romania convent where the other sisters have no contact with the outside world”; nothing about the girls, of varying ages and desires, and some more interesting than the others, stuck together; and almost zero about the couple who have put them in harm’s way. The actors, with the exception of Bateman, and that largely because she is the star victim this time, are largely impassive.

One thing is clear though, we are not done with Annabelle yet. The photo the nun shows of her Romania convent has a mysterious figure lurking in the shadows. Up next in The Conjuring series is Nun.

 Read full review at Indian Express

Movie rating ★★☆☆☆ 

Conjuring up past horrors

Jake Wilson

Certain Australian commentators may have struggled to know how to feel about the rise of James Wan, one of our biggest recent cinematic success stories.

Wan owes his Hollywood career to the Saw series, which was massively popular but widely damned as "torture porn" – a moralistic label that would apply with equal accuracy to several classic tales by Edgar Allen Poe.

Wan, at any rate, seems to have taken the criticism to heart. Since the Saw saga wrapped up in 2010, he's worked as producer, director or both on a string of far tamer horror films centred on the notion of ghostly or demonic possession, aimed at an older audience and free of intense gore.

Backtracking to the 1950s to explore the origins of the possessed doll of the title, Annabelle: Creation casts two Australians, Anthony La Paglia and Miranda Otto, as the dollmaker and his wife, who are mourning their own daughter when they open their home in rural California to a nun (Stephanie Sigman) and the orphaned girls in her care.

There's a fairy-tale appeal to the setting, and a degree of flair to the filmmaking – especially early on, when Sandberg emulates Wan's use of extended tracking shots in the Conjuring films to get us familiar with the layout of the house. But there's little of the ferocity that all horror needs in one form or another.

In putting young girls in close proximity to demons, the storyline unwisely invites comparison to William Friedkin's The Exorcist – a shocker that owes its enduring impact not just to Friedkin's craft, but to the sheer extremity of what the young star, Linda Blair, was made to say and do. For better or worse, Annabelle: Creation is not willing to go remotely as far in its portrayal of young girls as either victims or aggressors.

That's probably the socially responsible choice, but it means that the intended paradox of innocence co-existing with evil is never pushed to the point where it becomes genuinely alarming. Sometimes a creepy-looking doll is just a creepy-looking doll and no amount of repetition can make the sweet old song You Are My Sunshine even the slightest bit scary.

Read full review at Sydney Morning Herald