Movie review: The Conjuring.

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I just couldn't get back to crawling under the sink.  I decided to watch a recent purchase, named in the title.  I was in the perfect mood to watch a movie, physically.  And, really, this was the right type of show for my emotional mood.  Something about frustration makes horror seem reasonable?  Yeah.  I will be writing with great pains to avoid any spoilers.  I hate when someone pops spoilers into a review, at least without giving due warning.  Cretans who were born in barns.  Wait, I had a cousin who was born in a barn and she turned out to be a pretty good apple, for a girl.  :p

This isn't the fastest pace horror movie you will ever see.  Nor the goriest, or a whole list of other typical identifiers with the genre.  Which, to my tastes for the most part, is a good thing.  The flow and feel is more like a documentary of a documentary.  The documenters, and their subjects, are the... whole of the subject.  There are bits and pieces about the people, little bits of who they are, how they live, what they do, but the majority of the story is just about what happened.  This sort of movie making puts a bit of a buffer between the viewer and the story.  Which means, if your children are mature enough, this would be a scary movie they might be able to watch.  Still, some discretion is advised.  Younger teens, perhaps, would be as young as I would allow.

I personally enjoyed the details.  The bits and pieces.  But it seemed a bit scattered.  There were the investigators, the family, at the problem home, at another home, this and that.  Not unusual for a movie, though in this case it seemed to distract from the story.  This is the downside of what I suggested in the previous paragraph.  It does make it easier to watch, but mildly tampers the enthusiasm or moment.  It was not difficult to watch, it just wasn't difficult to find myself distracted at times.

The story is supposed to be based on real life events.  This notion, of course, has taken a real pounding since it became clear that the term "based on real events" has been taken so far out of context, so often, that believability is limited, and worse.  I actually purchased this in spite of the term, as an example.  After watching the movie, and from personal experience, I actually believe this was rather accurate to the real story, or could be.  I am sure some things were added for viewer appeal.  I am sure some things were not included that might have been more terrifying, but seemed too over-the-top.  It was quite refreshing to see a movie, suggesting that it was based on real events, actually seem plausibly so.

Better still, I didn't see political correctness, sexual oddity, feminism, or any of the other modernist trash that litters so many movies.  It was just a story, as it happened, with perhaps minor embellishments (or not... I am a skeptic to a greater degree and must hold the line!).  It was just a movie, not some typical Hollywood leftist preaching propaganda monstrosity.  Wonderful.  I think the only thing I could ask more would be a bit more filler data.  I can do without knowing more about each person, or see more of the family or social dynamics.  I didn't miss that.  But more background, perhaps more about the problem(s).  It just didn't have much.

All in all, I thought it was definitely worth watching.  I found it entertaining.  I didn't find it truly terrifying or horrifying, at least not directly.  In some ways, I think they did a better job.  The fright isn't with the story, or what people went through, but the underlying causes.  I think, in a way, they did far better at striking a bit of fear, and reflection, than if they had rigged the movie to present as a typical horror flick.  Evil is out there.  And, sometimes, it will find you.

I give the movie an 8.5/10.