Review: Annabelle - Creation

Annabelle: Creation
Cert: 15 / 109 mins / Dir. David F. Sandberg / Trailer



Since the early days of cinema, film-makers have had a fascination with children's toys and the macabre. There's a certain uncanny juxtaposition to be made between the enforced innocence of cherished playthings and their often rigid, mechanical facsimile of the living. I only mention this now because mechanical facsimiles of beloved things may well come up again later.
**look to camera**

Taking place twelve years before the events of Annabelle, we join retired doll-maker Samuel Mullins (Anthony LaPaglia) and his wife Esther (Miranda Otto), living alone in the US dustland and distraught after losing their only daughter in a tragic accident years earlier*¹. In a bid to inject some purpose back into their lives, the couple open their home to the church as an orphanage*². But the ghosts of the past are more than emotional, and one in particular wants to come out and play...

On the plus-side (because I think we all know where this review is heading), at least the series seems to have stopped trying to convince the audience it's based on 'true events'. Relieved of the crippling burden of disbelief-suspension, the audience can at least enjoy the film for what it is - an efficient, if thoroughly heavy-handed, supernatural horror. Taking a format we're all familiar with and an outcome that's pretty much defined by earlier (although chronologically later) entries in the series, Annabelle: Creation executes its frights with practiced ease (even if they're telegraphed to the point where each jolt is nothing more than a physical response to a face appearing on-screen and the subwoofers jabbing into life).

For the most part, the performances here are all par for the genre, with the exception of the young leads Talitha Bateman as Janice and Lulu Wilson as her best friend Linda. Spirited and convincing performances from 'child actors' are a rarity even these days and given the potentially-traumatic subject matter, these two excel in their roles. And not to jump too far ahead, but the film's final link to another chapter in the series is a nice touch, too.

It's just that... well, here we go. The budget for this prequel may have risen ($15m from Annabelle's $6.5m), but the levels of imagination haven't. And it's not that Creation relies on jump-scares so much; that's actually what the film consists of. For me to complain about their presence here would be like griping about a Jim Carrey comedy which features gurning. The problem is that after the first act has set up its plethora of callback-dominoes, the scares are used as the connecting thread for a procession of well-worn horror tropes. To wit:

✓ An overtly creepy doll to replace a lost child (forgivable given the film's subject)
✓ An empty/abandoned nursery containing carefully placed children's toys
✓ One of which is a dolls house with a locationally-symbolic inhabitant
✓ And a gramophone playing a jaunty record in an errie fashion
✓ Someone being dragged screaming across the floorboards into a darkened room behind them
✓ That thing where someone steps into the shadows and their eyes glow
✓ A franticly scrambling creature under the house
✓ A burgeoning cloud of darkness spewing out of a room
✓ The requisite amount of possession and telekinetic carnage one expects with this sort of thing
✓ And let's not forget the well, outside

Much like Hellraiser IV where we see the origin of the puzzle box*³, delving further back into the doll's past threatens to dilute any sense of mystery and threat. Annabelle's reputation rests on it having to murder pretty much everyone on-screen by the time the credits roll. Now that didn't happen in her first standalone film, so...

The cinematic equivalent of a ghost train, Creation is meticulously constructed, but nothing leaps out that the paying punters haven't seen before. If Quiet-Quiet-Bang™ is your thing, you'll probably have fun; it's better than the first Annabelle movie. Although so is herpes.

Best line, from curmudgeonly Samuel, showing the new arrivals round the house:

"Me and my wife stay in this room, the rest of the house is yours to do as you please. Oh, apart from the locked bedroom upstairs that I'll conveniently forget to mention until your hand is on the door later. And I say 'locked', it isn't. You'll see.
So yeah, the whole house apart from our room and the room upstairs.
Oh, and barn.
[sigh]
I'll come in again..."

Pretty much any studio-horror movie of the last ten years.



The jump-scares are more enforced on a big screen, so if that's your thing…



Continue the franchise? Yep.



Hang one, you've got a young actress with long dark hair whose name is Samara and you've put her in this instead of a Ring movie..?



Not unless you say something stupid like 'it's my favourite film in the world ever'.



There isn't.



Level 2: Miranda Otto is in this, and she was in those Lord of the Rings movies with (amongst many others) Sir Christopher 'Dooku' Lee.





*¹ Not that it's a spoiler at all, but the Annabelle strand seems to work in 12-year cycles of events. I'll be interested to see if anything more is done with that in the future. Either that, or if it's already been revealed why the 12-years is significant and I've just missed it because I've been rolling my eyes throughout each film. ^{[ BACK ]}

*² You can see the reasoning. "We've got unresolved bereavement issues over our little girl, an untouched room full of her stuff and a haunted doll that we're still terrified of. Naturally, the best thing we can do here is give a bunch of already-vulnerable kids free rein to poke around the house. What can go wrong..?" ^{[ BACK ]}

*³ Speaking of such an era, the trailers before this movie were for the upcoming remakes of Flatliners and It. Other than the stragglers of my vintage band shirt collection, I'm not sure I'm ready to relive the early nineties just yet, thanks... ^{[ BACK ]}


DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.

Review: Lights Out

Lights Out
Cert: 15 / 81 mins / Dir. David F. Sandberg / Trailer

Act I: "What, me? Oh, I'm just working late and alone in a poorly-lit industrial unit full of mannequins on a deserted business-park. Yeah, I'm sure nothing could go wrong…"

A curiously late entry this far into the season for David Sandberg's Lights Out, this is a strict 'genre-flick'. Based on his short film by the same name, I have - to be brutally fair - seen vintage steam engines that were less mechanical. That's not to say it's an inherently bad film, but it feels like someone's done a paint-by-numbers horror movie, and just ended up using black for most of the colours, anyway. A surprisingly capable cast cruise through this tale of a traumatised woman and her mildly dysfunctional family, as they're plagued by a creature known as Diana, who exists only in the darkness and has a penchant for destroying the light.

This is a very efficiently made movie, but the scares are overly-telegraphed and the plot unfurls itself without building up the tension required for any kind of reveal (although at a lean 81 minutes, there really isn't time for holding anything back). As far as the writing goes, the screenplay uses mental illness and a primal fear of the dark as a clever analogy for mental illness and a primal fear of the dark. Yeah.

Act II: "Oh, I seem to have conveniently stumbled across an old filing-box full of photographs, case notes and an audio-recording of the time when our nemesis was a patient in a psychiatric unit. Well now that mystery's fully unravelled, I'm sure nothing could go wrong…"

Credit where it's completely due though, the premise of Lights Out means the film's budget is used excellently, with the most tense scenes relying on little more than lighting-states and acting. Because when your antagonist only appears in silhouette, you can achieve a hell of a lot with a hell of a little. The make-up box is broken out for the climactic showdown, but the film's earned it by that point. In fact, the fundamentals of lighting and acting are executed so well that it underlines how much they're propping up the pick'n'mix screenplay.

Teresa Palmer heads up the cast as a Movie Metaller*¹ who has to deal with the recurring trauma of her mother and protection of her younger brother, played by Gabriel Bateman (who's still young enough to play all this shit with a straight face and not look bored with his lines, unlike the rest of the cast). Still, it's no relief to realise that after two thudding Silent Hill movies, Maria Bello's role in Lights Out as the scared/bewildered/psychotic mother means that her career hasn't moved on a single iota.

Act III: "Well, I guess I'll just have to venture alone down into this cellar to restore the power and lighting we so desperately need. I have a completely non-brittle UV tube with me though, so I'm sure nothing could go wrong…"

I think my favourite aspect is that a character dies in the first five minutes (a character who knows the film's three central characters and is shown to be in regular contact with at least one of them), and nobody even notices until about two minutes before the end. Which in plot-time is about two whole days.

Bulletproof, Dave; bulletproof…



All Of The Horror™.



Not particularly.



Not particularly.



I should hope not.



Doubtful.



There isn't.



Level 2: Lights Out features Andi Osho, who appeared in three episodes of Holby City back in 2012 which also starred Hugh 'Panaka' Quarshie.




*¹ The kind of Metaller who's Demonstrably Metal™ because she a) wears black-mesh tops, b) lives in a flat above a tattoo-parlour and c) has an Avenged Sevenfold poster blu-tacked at an unconventional angle in her largely mainstream flat. I think there's supposed to be some subtext that because she had some poorly-explained childhood trauma, this turned her All Metal™. But it's that kind of Metal™ where someone appears to have ram-raided Hot Topic before borrowing Trivium's greatest hits, rather than adopting any kind of alternative ethos at all…


DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.