Movie Review: ‘Annabelle Comes Home’ Blu-ray

Review by Lauryn Angel

Dolls are everywhere this summer: the Toy Story gang is back; Chucky got a make-over; and Annabelle is looking for a new host. Annabelle Comes Home is the third movie about the creepy doll from the first film in The Conjuring franchise – and likely not the last, either. As far as the Annabelle movies go, this installment is better than Annabelle, but not quite as good as Annabelle: Creation.

As the film’s title suggests, the film is about the possessed doll coming to the home of Ed (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine Warren (Vera Farmiga). After discovering that the usual blessing is enough to contain the evil, they install the doll in the glass case we’ve seen in previous films. Lorraine affirms that this is enough to contain the evil, but she wasn’t accounting for the Warrens’ young daughter, Judy (McKenna Grace) – or Judy’s babysitter, Mary Ellen (Madison Iseman) and her friend, Daniela (Katie Sarife).

It’s really Daniela who is the problem, for both the Warrens and for the sake of the plot. Daniela has a good reason to be so obsessed with the Warrens and their supernatural occupation, but it’s hard to feel sympathy for a character who manipulates her friend and then violates that friend’s trust in order to do the very thing everyone warns her not to do, which also goes against common sense. Maybe Daniela doesn’t watch enough horror movies, but breaking into the Warrens’ artifact room and touching things you know nothing about, except that they were recovered from cases dealing with demon possession and haunting seems like a bad thing to do. So of course Daniela does it.

And then, if you’ll pardon the expression, all hell breaks loose. Not only does Annabelle escape the artifact room, but so do several other entities who have been trapped there. (I predict at least three spin-off films from this.) The three girls not only have to survive the night, but figure out how to re-contain the evil – with the assistance of Bob (Michael Cimino) – the boy who lives across the street and Mary Ellen’s crush.

Annbelle Comes Home is a solid summer horror flick. Unlike its sister-spin-off The Nun, it doesn’t rely too heavily on jump-scares, instead building the tension and creating an atmosphere of uncertainty, leading to some genuinely creepy scenes. And while Daniela’s lack of common sense is annoying, her motivation to do what she does makes sense.

Annabelle Comes Home may not be the strongest entry in the films set in the world of Ed and Lorraine Warren, but it’s certainly not the worst, either. If you want to see a movie about a creepy murderous doll, I’d recommend seeing the remake of Child’s Play first. But if you’ve seen that and you haven’t had enough, Annabelle isn’t a bad follow-up.