The Conjuring: Last Rites Fails to Scare in Its Final Case

The Conjuring: Last Rites

★ ★ ½

The Conjuring: Last Rites is the third sequel in The Conjuring series that also spawned several spinoffs. It tries to fuse emotional family drama with demonic horror—sometimes it clicks, other times the tension simply leaks out. This is supposed to be a sendoff film, billed as the case that ended the careers of real-life paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren. The movies are heavily fictionalized accounts but the plausibility of the spiritual warfare is what makes them more terrifying.

But instead of a chilling farewell, Last Rites plays like a film caught between honoring its characters and delivering the dread that defined them.

Ed has been played by Patrick Wilson and Lorraine by Vera Farmiga in all the franchise films, including the spinoffs. Their chemistry and compassion anchor the series, a human warmth set against the franchise’s darkest terrors.

Patrick Wilson as Ed Warren and Vera Farmiga as Lorraine Warren
© 2025 Warner Bros. Pictures

This film opens in 1964, early in their career, when a younger Lorraine (Madison Lawlor) is pregnant with their only child Judy (Mia Tomlinson). She and younger Ed (Orion Smith) work a case in which a demon with seething malice lingers within a mirror in an antique shop. They cast out the demon, but the effort nearly breaks Lorraine—triggering early labor.

We flash forward to 1986 when they (now played by Wilson and Farmiga) are semi-retired, advising Catholic clergy and lecturing on the paranormal. They’re trying to get back to a normal life. Ed’s doctor warns his heart won’t survive another attack. Judy gets engaged, a subplot that gestures toward family stakes but adds little to the horror.

Outside the Warren home
© 2025 Warner Bros. Pictures

Judy seems to have Lorraine’s gift for sensing and seeing entities no one else can. From a young age, Lorraine taught Judy a child’s song to sing to herself to block them out. Now an adult, those coping mechanisms aren’t holding up.

Unseen forces are bent on pulling Ed and Lorraine back into paranormal investigation. A West Pittston, Penn., family, The Smurls, gain national media attention for a demonic haunting in their home. The Warrens are asked to help, which they decline until they discover the evil entity attacking the Smurls is rooted in their own paranormal history. It’s the case that caused them to officially retire.

The movie never decides what it wants to be. Is it a nostalgic family drama where paranormal investigators retire and try to live a normal life or is it a horror film where evil must be cast out from a home? On paper, the family drama and horror should mesh; instead, they cancel each other out, bleeding tension.

Vera Farmiga as Lorraine Warren
© 2025 Warner Bros. Pictures

What worked well for the other films in the series was a strong set up of what the Warrens are in for: a family tormented by something dark, evil and disturbing from the beyond. The Warrens come in, get to know the family and battle the evil. They develop a relationship with the family, and we care enough about the characters to feel fear for them.

Here, the Warrens don’t reach the Smurls until two-thirds in, leaving their efforts rushed, formulaic—a checklist instead of a battle that tests them. It’s not the send-off the filmmakers intended: if this was truly their last case, it plays like old hat — nothing we haven’t seen before.

Patrick Wilson as Ed Warren
© 2025 Warner Bros. Pictures

Scary movies work only when tension builds relentlessly and we care enough about the characters to feel it in our bones. We have the characters to care for, but the nostalgia gets in the way of the tension.

We’re promised a film revolving around a case so horrific and taxing on the Warrens that they called it quits. What we’re given is a case too slight, too safe—a whimper where there should have been a haunting. This time, the darkness never sends the hairs on our neck standing.