Reviews
‘The Conjuring: Last Rites’ Review: Back To Basics, But Is Basic Enough?
The Conjuring: Last Rites is a film that feels anxious. Anxious about sending off its characters, anxious about cutting things too short, and anxious about taking any risks. Ultimately, it is what it needs to be. It’s a back-to-basics entry in the series, designed from head to toe to give the Warrens the kind of peculiarly pleasant poltergeist filled sendoff you’d expect. Conjuring fans will be pleased with how it evokes the first two films and how much love it shows its main characters. But for those with little emotional attachment to the franchise and those who find little appeal in callbacks, the back-to-basics approach won’t do much.
The Conjuring Is A Billion Dollar Beast That Must Be Fed
Maybe it’s a righteous anxiety. If the Nightmare on Elm Street series was what made New Line Cinema “The House That Freddy Built”, then it’s safe to say the Conjuring franchise made New Line Cinema “The House That James Wan Kept In Order”. As of this year, The Conjuring’s cinematic universe is a multi-billion-dollar property and the most financially reliable one in all of horror history (at the very least the highest grossing). It demands repeating what you’ve done before, because that is what has made New Line and Atomic Monster money hand over fist for more than a decade now.
But what makes money and what makes a film great have never really been the same, have they?
This leads to a story and plot devices and performances you’ve seen before: a demon does bad things to a family of good people, this time in suburban Pennsylvania, as the film attempts to depict the Smurl haunting of 1986. Ed and Lorraine Warren show up to help them, once again played by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga. They are terrorized by haunted children’s toys, monsters lurking in mirrors and shadows, and it all culminates in a big exorcism. The primary difference this time around is that the Warrens themselves are victims as well, as their daughter, Judy (Mia Tomlinson), is being targeted by a malicious entity simultaneously, one that has had her on its list since the day she was born.
The (Fictional) Warrens Final Ride Tugs At The Heartstrings
Despite any grievances one might have with the real-life Warrens, I have always been of the opinion that the fictional Warrens were the least interesting part of the series. An insistence on putting Ed and Lorraine front and center in the second and third films seemed to overlook that the majority of the charm of the first film was in the time we spent with the Perron family. Their slow burn suffering through the Infestation and Oppression steps of the Warren’s iconic three-stage demon map, their struggle against the unknown, that was what made the first film iconic and atmospheric. Some of that is recreated here with the Smurls and their realistic family conflict in the face of the supernatural. But make no mistake, this film belongs to the Warrens.
And this entry, surprising as it may be, made me actually enjoy watching the Warrens and seeing their relationship with their now grown daughter Judy play out. Tomlinson delivers on her role, bringing life to a character who was effectively a latchkey kid, coming home every day to an arsenal of the most wildly evil artifacts on earth. Here, she has developed psychic abilities similar to her mother, leading to a struggle to suppress them and live a normal life. Her relationship with her parents is believable, and she plays especially well opposite Farmiga.
Heartwarming Climax with a Sentimental Edge
Our fourth expedition with the Warrens is undeniably schmaltzy in highlighting this, but that sentimentality it smacks you with intertwines with the plot nicely. It even takes the usual bombastic climax you’ve come to anticipate from modern exorcism films and actually tries to say something instead of just knocking you in the head repeatedly with eerie visuals and loud noises. The big confrontation, which evolves from the walls of a house exploding and people being thrown around by infernal telekinesis, ultimately becomes something heartwarming and on theme.
The Conjuring: Last Rites Is A House Tonally Divided
Now despite the sweetness in that regard, the film cannot be saved from its more glaring flaws by the power of family. Last Rites comes in at a slightly bloated 2 hours and 15 minutes runtime due to the cutting back and forth between its a-plot and its b-plot. The fact the actual Smurl haunting feels like a B-plot at all until the final third of the film is a symptom of a much bigger disconnect in the script.
Last Rites is a scare-a-minute fare on one side, chock full of jump scares and some actually very effective set pieces surrounding its paranormal antagonists (see: one of the Smurl daughters scouring a tape to catch a glimpse of the entity attacking her family, and the surprising death of a series regular). But its other half is too whimsical to bridge the gap. It’s hard to get in and out of the mood to be scared by malevolent spirits when you have things like a table tennis montage between Ed and Judy’s new boyfriend set to Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” jerking you back into lightheartedness.
What results is a film that, while entertaining as the closer to the series in abstract, ultimately fails to reach the practical levels of dread the original or its sequel did. The Conjuring still manages to give me consistent chills with its scares all these years later, but Last Rites only manages to land hits a little more than half the time. It is a house tonally divided, and it’s a miracle that it doesn’t totally collapse by the end despite that division.
Michael Chaves Directing Course Corrects For The Finale
Returning director Michael Chaves, who helmed The Devil Made Me Do It and The Nun II, at the very least revitalizes things from the aesthetic downgrade we got in the last film. He doesn’t bring the heat he was bringing in The Nun II, but he does recover from the misstep that was the third movies’ cartoonish presentation.
The movement of the camera and the visuals provided here are the course correction the series really needed for its final run. It feels reductive to say he’s a good understudy for James Wan, given he’s directed more Conjuring films than Wan has at this point, but it’s hard not to make the comparison when so much of this film calls back to that original that started it all.
The Conjuring: Last Rites closes the book on a very large chapter of horror history, along with serving a side of the warm and fuzzies for those particularly invested in the characters Wilson and Farmiga made famous. But it’s far from the best the franchise has to offer, suffering from tonal whiplash and an inconsistent ability to generate scares. While I’m glad for the horror fans that will enjoy it, I have a nagging feeling that “The Case That Ended It All” won’t stand the test of time the way its predecessors have.
Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a piece of visual candy that everyone needs to get a taste of. Fitting, considering candy is at the center of the film’s visual language, and even becomes a large part of its set dressing. It’s an aesthetic choice that might signal to some that the film is meant to be more sugary or cloying about what it’s trying to say. And while it has a streak of sentimentality over horror films and how they shape their viewers that borders on being maudlin, Camp Miasma is genuinely too clever and full of surprises to be that simple.
The opening credits, for one, hold a personal favorite of these surprises. The sequence is an extended montage of merch and material for the fictional Camp Miasma films at the center of the plot; it’s an ersatz Friday the 13th franchise with a Sleepaway Camp story, and a Halloween number of awful sequels.
Camp Miasma Has Surprises in Store for You
The collection we’re treated to is a rapid-fire barrage of proof for the film’s attention to detail, with painstakingly crafted props and artwork that feel very familiar. VHS tapes and DVDs across the decades. Action figures and arcade games, Topps style movie trading cards with a stick of bubble gum that has long since turned to dust. And most enjoyably, a series of negative reviews and scandalous articles depicting the rise and fall of Camp Miasma as a series.
By the end of that montage, I felt nostalgia for movies that I had not and would never see, and that hit like a Mack truck. While this does very effectively set the stage for a simple meta-horror film, plucking at the familiar chords of something like Behind the Mask, Camp Miasma really violently breaks the mold. What results is a cosmic horror romantic comedy drama slasher, and more importantly, it’s one of the best-looking movies you’ll see all year as it pulls off that wild balancing act.
(That is, if you’re close enough to a theater showing it to see it.)
What is Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma About?
After entering a period of dormancy following a handful of box office bombs and dwindling popularity, the problematic Camp Miasma franchise has returned as a “zombie IP” decades later. The rights holders are hungry for a profitable reboot. And the necromancer they’ve hired for the job is the ambitious but green writer-director Kris (Hannah Einbinder). A critically acclaimed queer filmmaker, she’s begrudgingly tasked with sanding down its transphobic and sexist edges in favor of something cleaner and more palatable.
In search of inspiration, Kris visits Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), the actress for final girl Squeak from the first Camp Miasma film. The reclusive Billy lives at the real-life camp the film was shot at, isolated from the world and crystallized into a horror movie museum. Immediately finding kinship in their love of the franchise, Kris’ fascination with getting Billy to star in the reboot quickly turns into romantic interest. But as that romance develops, the awkward Kris’s sexual awakening coincides with strange occurrences and hallucinations that suggest the film, and its killer, may be much more real than she bargained for.
A Wildly Fun Project That Changes the Pace for Jane Schoenbrun
It’s borderline criminal how narrow and staggered the theatrical release for Camp Miasma is going to be, because all the love it’s been getting on the festival circuit is not just critical buzz. It’s not an inside baseball sort of film, despite its myriad references to the horror genre on either side of the camera. It is, in fact, the director’s most accessible and fun film yet.
That was pretty vocally Schoenbrun’s goal; their third full length feature really does succeed with flying colors at feeling like “a conversation with a friend”, a sentiment they communicated during a Deadline interview at Cannes. It certainly feels lighter and more playful with the audience at the very least. We’re All Going to the World’s Fair was a noided, uncomfortable psychological endeavor about ARGs, internet culture, and isolated youth. I Saw the TV Glow was an expertly crafted but very harrowing thesis on the trans experience, dysphoria, and alienation.
But Camp Miasma, despite the dark places that it goes to for its characters, is a movie filled with so much cheer and humor, and made with so much care and love, that you can feel it in every single frame. The story it tells is inherently a happy one, despite the number of times someone explodes into a geyser of blood thanks to our film’s killer, Little Death. (Yes, they basically named him The Orgasm, but I said the movie was fun and made with love, not that it was particularly subtle.)
Expertly Exploring Sexuality and Filmmaking with Anderson and Einbinder
One also shouldn’t mistake the emphasis on how fun it is as an excuse for the film lacking substance either. Camp Miasma is heartfelt in its craft but really does boast a depth of character in its writing with how it explores desire and sexuality. It’s about sexual tension, sexual dysfunction, sexual trauma, and ultimately sexual liberation. And most importantly, it’s about how sex and sexuality inspires, informs, and shapes art on a fundamental level and vice versa.
The script is certainly thoughtful in this aspect but is especially carried by the two leads who fit their roles like they were poured into them. Even when Schoenbrun’s writing is heavy-handed and veers into self-indulgent territory (read: inevitable given the self-referential nature of the story), the two hold it down tremendously. Anderson is always a delight to see but is exceptionally charming here as Billy. The silky southern accent and the mellow Hollywood starlet appeal are all you really need to fall in love the way Kris does, but the charm masks a much more complex set of feelings that lie just below the surface.
More importantly, Einbinder’s captivating performance drives the film as much as the film drives her character. As Kris discovers more about herself, the breadth of emotion that begins to be unlocked translates to a really compelling unfolding of the material in Einbinder’s hands. It also culminates in the film’s funniest moment as Kris’ revelations about Camp Miasma and herself spill out at the worst possible time; it’s a scene that kills in a packed theater, and it’s worth the price of admission just to see it.
The Best Set Design You’ll See in A Movie All Year
Above all else, Camp Miasma deserves its flowers for its photography and production design. Schoenbrun and cinematographer Eric Yue have concocted one of the most visually striking and texturally rich movies this year from a photography standpoint. The camera work, color grading, and lighting are all phenomenally visceral. Appropriately so, given the subject matter at hand.
But what really steals the show is the set design. Designers Matt Hyland and Brandon Tonner-Connolly deserve praise in particular, having crafted the absolutely gorgeous glass matte backdrops that make up so much of the film’s exterior shots. They, like all of the set design here and Schoenbrun’s use of soft lighting and super-rich colors, are a good cross section of what makes the film tick: they are enticingly surreal, suffused with this almost visible dream energy. It’s all marked by glowing memories and the desire to return to them in a palpable way. There’s nostalgia in every brushstroke of those matte paintings, and every bit of the film’s composition.
I could go on, but the summary judgment for the best franchise that never existed is already in: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a kaleidoscope of pure emotion and creative passion that needs to be seen on the big screen post-haste. If you get the chance to see it on one, don’t hesitate to take it.
If film school wasn’t scary enough because of incel film-bros and awful thesis projects, a serial killer is now hunting down film students! As a former film student, that’s scary! Or is it? Urban Legends: Final Cut is decidedly not frightening. In fact, it’s barely quantifiable as horror. However, if you’re wanting some late 90s-Y2K slice-and-dicing, you’ve come to the right place.
More similar to the Scream franchise than the first Urban Legend, Final Cut maintains its academic setting, switching over this time to a film academy. A group of tight-knit co-eds are hard at work on their Senior projects. Each is vying for the prestigious Hitchcock Award, which would guarantee feature funding, alongside Hollywood stardom! However, when a fencing-masked serial killer starts taking them out one-by-one, it becomes clear someone would kill to make it big. The movie is a ton of fun, with really intelligent meta-humor and a surprisingly complex mystery.
Urban Legends: Final Cut is Meta-Slashing Done Right
Meta-slashers are old news in 2026-definitely no doubt about that! However, coming out the same year as Scream 3, one has to respect Urban Legends: Final Cut on its multiple layers. Making the first film basically an “urban legend” in this movie is a really fun concept.
Having our final girl, Amy (Jennifer Morrison), make a student-film version of the original Urban Legend is additionally really inventive. The movie has an awareness of slashers and horror movies like Scream, but its nerdiness feels like it overpowers the full-on story. It boasts a really complicated mystery!
The film works as a comedic, suspenseful whodunit, while having a lot of fun with its set pieces. Its setting is also not just a random change-of-pace. Its mystery (without spoiling) is intertwined with the concept of student filmmaking, with every little joke and jab having some connection to the overarching mystery. Understandable why horror fans may have been disappointed, but still, its mystery is top-notch, albeit with some predictable outcomes.
What is interesting is how tonally the movie feels much more in line with Scream than Urban Legend. It has no dark academia creeps, but visually it is a poppier, more pop-corny horror flick. The characters are all a little cartoonish, and its plethora of solid film industry jokes (that land maybe 60% of the time…?) make it really light viewing. For this critic, it’s a positive. However, that might not be a total positive for fans of the first.
A Franchise Done Dirty
Subjectively, this is a movie that really works. However, objectively, it is really frustrating as a franchise film. On its own, Final Cut sustains itself as a really fun meta-whodunit. However, as a sequel to Urban Legend? It’s totally baffling.
The biggest crime of this movie is that it is a sequel with no reason in being such. It only vaguely connects to the first film, and more importantly…HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH URBAN LEGENDS! The idea that the first movie is an urban legend is really clever! However, the first movie had nothing to do with the film industry! They could have at least played into some film urban legends, like with the skeletons in Poltergeist or the deaths surrounding The Omen or The Exorcist, but no. It really squandered this clear opportunity to make a throughline between meta film humor and urban legends.
Additionally, the movie is far from perfect outside of its franchise follies. For one, and this is a total nitpick and gripe, the killer mask. The fencing mask is pretty baffling, and feels really disconnected. Why not give him camera lenses for eyes? Or any kind of classic film monster mask? It’s a film school, so the opportunities should be endless for mask design. Additionally, a lot of the humor is kind of outdated, but that’s to be expected from an early-2000s horror flick.
Slasher 101
This might not matter at all to the casual viewer, but the film has a really good understanding of film school. It’s accurate in the production and environment of film school, even if it is heightened. This further lends itself to the commentary of the movie. Well, what commentary there vaguely is.
For all its silliness, the film covers a lot of issues of the film industry, particularly in academic spaces. Misogynistic film bros, toxic masculinity on sets, and nepotism are all topical social issues in the industry. The movie tackles social commentary as gracefully as a 2000s slasher-comedy can…which is just okay. But it still does it!
Urban Legends: Final Cut is definitely worth checking out. As long as you do not consider it a sequel. It is totally in a league of its own…for better or worse.
