“The Conjuring” is one of the movies where you mention it and at least one person in the room knows what you’re talking about. The story of Ed and Lorraine Warren is a famous one, made that way by the movies, and as of Sept. 5, 2025, their story comes to an end in “The Conjuring: Last Rites.”

Before going into the movie, a lot of people seem to have left a five star review, or higher. “The Conjuring and the Conjuring 2 remain some of the best horror films within the last 15 years for my taste. Some would even say the conjuring is one of the top horror films of all time,” said reviewer tresm87 on IMDb.

However, many have said that the movie was uninteresting, kind of following recent feedback from other famous movie series – such as “The Conjuring” – and ends horribly. Reviews say that the story started well, but ended on a lackluster note, seeming rushed and cautious about if this is really the end, which many believe it should be. 

The movie is simply not scary. The jumpscares were half-assed, the cause of that being the fact that the storyline was genuinely non-existent, the backstory was nowhere to be found, and the CGI was…..eh. The acting was well done, and Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga who have played Ed and Lorraine since the beginning still have a lot of chemistry on screen. 

Ben Hardy who plays Tony Spera, and Mia Tomlinson who portrays Judy Warren were a welcome addition. However, the actors cannot carry the performance by themselves, and the movie would have been substantially better if there was more care and depth put into it, but the actors worked with what they had. 

Their performance wasn’t worthy enough to get chills, but it was still done well enough to get the actors a nice payday. Farmiga is set to earn the highest amount at $4 million, Wilson is set to earn $2 million, while Hardy and Tomlinson are set to earn $400,000 and $300,000 from the movie, respectively. The franchise as a whole has grossed $2.39 billion worldwide and nearly $2.4 billion at the box office for the “Last Rites,” according to IMDb and FandomWire. 

The film was still enjoyable, even though it was disappointing. It just sucked that it ended with “the power of friendship/family” vibes, which is different to how the others ended – more on a “oh wow, we survived” type of note. 

The actual story of the Warren family is way more twisted and perverted, so watching the movie was a little off putting knowing what was actually happening at the time. (Their story truly ruins the franchise, in my opinion.) Having to separate the art from the reality was hard, but necessary to get through the movies. 

They could have done a little more history on the storyline, rather than pulled from clichés. That’s what this movie was, shallow and cliché, and towards the end it definitely got worse. They used Annabelle but never expanded on why she was even in the movie – so Judy is scared of her…so what? Why is she being used in a completely unrelated haunting? There are so many loose ends that were just never tied up, leaving the audience unsatisfied.

I don’t regret seeing it in the theater, that was definitely an experience, but throughout the entire experience I only got caught by some jumpscares and foreboding scenes, wanting to – or actually – sticking my nose under the blanket “hiding”, but I was never truly scared, and it never lasted long. I fully expected “wanting to leave the theater” type of scared however I never got to that point. 

People are scared to have a “bad” ending nowadays. Not a bad ending where you leave feeling disappointed and unsatisfied, but a bad ending where you walk out of the theater with shock, “How could the directors do that?” “I can’t believe they just….died,” that kind of feeling, the pit in your stomach, the little bit of dread that hangs with you on the drive home. It all has to have a perfect happy ending. THAT is what disappoints me the most.