ANNABELLE: CREATION (2017)

Studio:       New Line Cinema
Director:    David F. Sandberg
Writer:       Gary Dauberman
Producer:  Peter Safran, James Wan
Stars:     Stephanie Sigman, Talitha Bateman, Lulu Wilson, Anthony LaPaglia, Miranda Otto, Grace Fulton, Philippa Coulthard, Samara Lee, Tayler Buck, Lou Lou Safran

Review Score:

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Summary:

Orphans living in a dollmaker’s home discover a secret within the walls that awakens a demonic presence.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Using handwritten notes as clues, Annabelle Mullins plays hide and seek with her dollmaker father Sam, who runs his toy company out of the family’s remote country home. When her parents stop to fix a tire on their drive home from church, Annabelle inadvertently runs into the road and is killed by a passing car.

12 Years Later – With his disfigured wife Esther living in seclusion in a backroom, Sam opens his house to an orphanage in need of a new location. Sister Charlotte moves into Sam’s house with older orphans Nancy and Carol, younger girls Kate and Tierney, and best friends Linda and Janice, the latter of whom is crippled from polio.

Sam forbids anyone from entering his daughter’s bedroom. Sister Charlotte and some of the girls begin having eerie experiences when alone, as if someone is in an empty room with them.

A hide and seek note found on the floor leads Janice to a closet in Annabelle’s bedroom. Janice discovers the Annabelle doll on the other side of the closet door, which is covered in bible pages. Spooked by the doll’s appearance, Janice throws a sheet over it. The doll rises and walks toward Janice, but nothing is there when the sheet falls to the floor. Linda later encounters the doll while hiding in a secret passage.

Sister Charlotte shows Sam a picture of her in Romania with three other nuns. Sam notices a frightening fifth nun in a shadow within the picture.

Carol and Nancy are frightened by a specter while playing a ghost story game beneath a blanket. The girls assume the shadowy shape was Mrs. Mullins, which Sam claims is impossible since Esther has not been able to walk for years.

Janice finds a photograph of Annabelle Mullins with the doll. Demonic eyes appear in the picture when it is in darkness.

Creeped out by the doll, Linda leaves Janice alone with it. Paranormal activity plagues Janice, forcing her to flee the room when a vision of Annabelle Mullins morphs into a demon that demands Janice’s soul.

A dark cloud of smoke chases Janice to the chairlift she needs to descend the stairs. Halfway down the staircase, the lift reverses direction, taking Janice back toward Annabelle. A supernatural force suddenly pulls Janice into the air and eventually drops her onto the floor below.

Sam and Charlotte bring Janice back to the house after she recovers in the hospital. Janice tells Charlotte that an evil presence she believes to be Annabelle Mullins is coming for her soul because she is the weakest of the girls. Janice warns that they need to leave the house.

In discussing what happened to Janice with his wife, Sam speculates that they made a mistake opening their house to the orphans. Esther contends that Janice’s experience was only an accident.

Linda peeps through a keyhole and sees the doll in a rocking chair. When she opens the door, the doll is no longer there. Frightened, Linda stands guard in her room by shooting a popgun into a shadow. A figure in the darkness grabs the ball from the gun and raises the reeling line. Linda hides in her bed. Linda looks over her bunk after the bed shakes and sees footprints on the floor. Linda spots the doll before a dark hand pulls the doll away.

Left alone outside in her wheelchair, Janice is suddenly pushed into the barn by a dark figure wearing a nun’s robe and habit. Janice confronts Annabelle in a crawlspace. Annabelle vomits black ectoplasm into Janice’s mouth. After Charlotte and Linda find her, Janice begins behaving as if possessed.

Sam speaks to Linda about Janice. Linda tells Sam that Janice saw his daughter. Linda also reveals that they found the doll, which Sam says is impossible because he sealed it away.

Sam goes into the house and finds the doll seated in the dining room with a hide and seek note. Janice morphs into a demon. The demon supernaturally snaps all of Sam’s fingers on the hand holding a crucifix toward the creature. Charlotte finds Sam dead on the floor.

Linda takes the doll from Janice while she sleeps and throws the doll into a well outside. Charlotte rescues Linda when demonic hands begin pulling her into the well. Charlotte and Linda replace the well cover and run back to the house as the cover violently rattles. Once they are inside, Charlotte and Linda see that the doll has returned to the couch.

Charlotte confronts Esther with the doll. Esther confesses that after their daughter died, she and Sam devoted themselves to whatever power could let them be with Annabelle again. They gave a spirit permission to inhabit the doll. Initially, the couple had fleeting glimpses of Annabelle in the house, but came to realize that the presence was not their daughter.

In trying to take Esther’s soul, the demon tore out her eye and crippled the woman. Sam reached out to the church for help. Esther was saved but the evil was still attached to the doll, so two priests sealed the doll inside the bedroom closet. Sam and Esther thought that helping the orphans would be their penance, but inadvertently gave the demon access to what it wanted most.

The orphan girls face possessed Janice. Janice cuts Carol, causing everyone to flee. The girls find Esther torn in half, with her upper torso nailed to a wall. Janice levitates Charlotte and throws her into a mirror. Linda is pulled into the darkness.

While attempting to start the car outside, Carol, Nancy, and Kate see a scarecrow in the headlights. Carol ends up trapped in the barn with the scarecrow, which comes to life and attacks. Nancy rescues Carol before the scarecrow can kill her.

Back in the house, Linda uses the dumb waiter to get down to the cellar. There she confronts an evil incarnation of Mrs. Mullins as Esther’s bloody torso crawls toward her. Pursued by the demon, Linda climbs back up the dumb waiter shaft.

Janice comes after Linda. Linda hides in the closet where the doll was first discovered. Charlotte rescues Linda and traps Janice inside the closet. As paranormal activity consumes the house, Charlotte and Linda escape outside where they regroup with the other four orphans.

Investigating police later open the closet, finding only the doll and a hole in the wall. Father Massey claims that the evil is gone from the doll and turns it over to police when all of the orphans refuse to take it. Sister Charlotte and the orphans leave the Mullins home in search of another place to live.

Still possessed, Janice reappears at St. Joachim Orphanage using the name Annabelle. Pete and Sharon Higgins adopt her.

12 Years Later – Now an adult, Annabelle breaks into her parents’ house with her cult leader boyfriend and murders Pete and Sharon. The Higgins’ next-door neighbor Mia Form hears Sharon’s screams and sends her husband John over to investigate.

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Review:

“Annabelle” (review here) began with a bloody home invasion bang.  Sequel/prequel “Annabelle: Creation” doesn’t exactly open on a whimper, though it does take its time getting the demonic doll action in gear.

It’s been twelve years since Sam and Esther Mullins lost their darling daughter in a tragic accident.  Sam’s dollmaking business is no longer booming and Esther currently hides as a bedridden recluse in a shuttered backroom.  So the couple opens their cobwebbed country house to an orphanage in search of a home, hoping fresh faces can bring light into their lives.

Sister Charlotte moves into the Mullins house with two teens, two tikes, and two best friends.  Precocious little Linda and polio-stricken Janice are inseparable, although something is about to come between them when a malevolent presence is disturbed in the dead daughter’s closet.

Sam seems to be hiding a dark family secret, which relates to a devilish doll.  A sinister spirit in search of a soul now has the girls in its sights.  From boogeyman boos of shapes in the shadows to nightmarish visions and a murderous scarecrow, this evil will stop at nothing until it finds a new home too.

When these terrors finally come out in force, adrenaline at last accelerates.  Getting there requires patience to outlast anticipation for some scares that never come.  Once its stride steadies however, the movie does everything and then some to keep nails between teeth using classic creepshow style.

First with “Lights Out” (review here) and now with “Annabelle: Creation,” director David F. Sandberg proves in just two outings that he is a master at making feature-length movies out of very slim premises.  Apparently influenced by the filmmaker who produced both projects, Sandberg also graduates with top honors from the James Wan School of Scary Movie Gags, where slick setups come first, and sensible plot falls a far distant second.

“Annabelle: Creation” calls more for showmanship than it does for storytelling.  As such, it’s a pure paranormal possession fright flick for the Sour Patch Kids and soda set, where leaping from seats is the only essential for a good time.  As for more substantial spooks, the script is so hollow you could hear a scream echoing infinitely off its walls.

Don’t look for a story anxious to connect logic dots.  “Annabelle: Creation” is populated by the kind of horror movie folks who are tortoise slow on the uptake, being dumbly dismissive about dangers or slowly approaching doorknobs as though daring someone to shout, “don’t go in there!”  Anthony LaPaglia, in a role that definitely doesn’t require a name, plays a part whose purpose is to deny all evidence of the obvious, even when he damn well knows better.  The amount of absurdity “Annabelle: Creation” asks to get away with would be laughable, if it didn’t make up the difference with stylishly eerie entertainment.

What many remember best about “Annabelle” are singular scenes of the basement bassinet and door-charging ghost.  Maybe it is fitting then, that “Annabelle: Creation” is a movie made up of memorable moments instead of a congruously coherent whole.

Adhering to the previously established rule that the Annabelle doll may never be seen moving, the filmmakers are forced to get creative with their creeps, which is exactly what they do.  Sandberg’s hand digs into the same bag of gimmicks that gave “Lights Out” its juice, i.e. plenty of tricks of the light and careful camera positioning to capture a jolt just right.

Sandberg also gets a helping hand from his crew as well as his subconscious to turn every inch of the set into a playground for suspense.  Production designer extraordinaire Jennifer Spence designed a dumb waiter that inspired a climactic sequence constructed on the spot.  A dream Sandberg had during filming led to a signature scene involving a child’s popgun fired at a figure in darkness.

It says a lot about Gary Dauberman’s simplistic screenplay that portions of the movie were made without it.  It also says a lot about a film’s strength of technique when scant story isn’t able to sink it.

“Annabelle: Creation” follows a formula, yet does so with fearsome flair.  Put expectations on “popcorn” and its domino line of expertly crafted illusions culminates in a crash of devilishly crowd-pleasing shrieks.  Just refrain from pulling back the curtain for fear of not finding anything else there.

NOTE: There is a post-credits scene.

Review Score:  60

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