Yet another formulaic horror movie - 3/10

by The Movie Inspector

A boring horror film, Annabelle Comes Home works with a tedious narrative that mostly utilizes cheap jump scares to set the tone yet results in something more laughable than scary. An empty plot with recycled material that becomes so repetitive result in an utterly difficult viewing.

I’m really tired of all these commercial horror films that follow the exact same formula which basically fools viewers into believing they are watching a horror film. Cheap and repetitive jump scares don’t define a horror film to be honest but rather the whole mood and how immersed viewers are. The latest entry in the Conjuring Franchise pretends to be something it’s not and that becomes clearly obvious as the film progresses. ‘Annabelle Comes Home’ follows a a girl and her friend who unknowingly release Annabelle from her confinement while babysitting the Warren’s daughter.

We kick off with a first act that takes far too long to pump the gas and does quite a lackluster job at introducing the characters and plot. The characters don’t even have proper arcs and most of the events felt quite random. The Warrens are typically underused, no surprise there and everything else the film has to offer feels underwhelming. A few useless supporting characters are given screen time for god knows what reason, plus that was unnecessary since our leads are already two dimensional. Annabelle doesn’t even feel like a real threat and I honestly didn’t know if there ever was one.

The acting was mostly ok but nothing could’ve saved the film from being this boring. That 106 minute runtime felt endless, I can’t recall how many times I checked my watch. As mentioned before, the scares aren’t really there and the only time the movie felt somewhat like a horror flick was during the climax where the tone felt right. However, that was merely a fraction of the runtime and couldn’t make up for all the absurdity that preceded it. One more thing, I truly understand that horror movies work with dim and low-key lighting but I had a really difficult time trying to see clearly as this took that to an extreme. 

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