The Conjuring:
Last Rites
IMDb Rating
87K+
IMDb Votes
74%
Rotten Tomatoes
$412M
Box Office
Synopsis & Review
The Conjuring Universe has been one of the most commercially durable franchises in horror history — eight films across thirteen years, generating over $2 billion in combined worldwide box office on budgets that never exceeded $40 million per entry. At its heart, always, have been Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga as Ed and Lorraine Warren: the real-life paranormal investigators whose case files provided the basis for the series. Last Rites — directed by Michael Chaves, who also helmed The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (2021) — is explicitly positioned as the final chapter of the Warrens' story. The film's premise is drawn from the Warrens' documented later cases: Lorraine, in her eighties and in declining health, experiences a vision of unprecedented power — not a specific haunting, but something that feels like a revelation about the origin and purpose of every entity she and Ed have faced across their careers. The vision points toward a remote religious community in rural Vermont, where something old and patient has been waiting for the Warrens to arrive — something that knows them by name, and has been shaping the circumstances of their lives for longer than either of them suspects.
Last Rites is not the finest film in the Conjuring series — that distinction remains with James Wan's original 2013 film, which established a template for atmospheric supernatural horror that the sequels have spent a decade trying to replicate. What Chaves has achieved, however, is something arguably more important for the franchise: a genuinely satisfying conclusion. The film is structured as a valediction — a last look at two people who have given their lives to a calling most of the world dismisses, and who face, in this final case, the full spiritual weight of what that calling has cost them. Wilson and Farmiga have inhabited these characters for over a decade, and their performances here carry a depth of accumulated history that transforms even the film's more conventional horror sequences into something with genuine emotional weight. The finale — which we will not describe in detail, but which has left audiences in prolonged silence — is the most emotionally ambitious ending the franchise has attempted, and it works. Last Rites is a franchise conclusion that respects its audience and honours the characters that built it. That is rarer than it should be.
Why Watch This Movie?
Wilson and Farmiga Deserve a Proper Farewell
Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga have given the horror genre one of its great screen partnerships — a marriage portrayed with genuine warmth, mutual respect, and the specific intimacy of two people who have shared decades of extraordinary experience. Last Rites gives them the space to close that partnership properly: there are scenes between them in this film that have no equivalent in any previous Conjuring entry, scenes of quietness and honesty and accumulated love that will be deeply moving to anyone who has followed the series. Whatever the film's other qualities, Wilson and Farmiga ensure that Ed and Lorraine Warren exit the screen in a manner commensurate with what they meant to the franchise.
The Most Ambitious Mythology in the Series
Previous Conjuring films have been largely self-contained case studies — each haunting its own discrete entity and circumstance. Last Rites is the first entry to attempt a unified cosmological explanation for the supernatural world the Warrens have inhabited: where these entities come from, what they want, and what the Warrens' specific vulnerability to them — and protection against them — actually means in theological terms. Whether the film's explanation fully satisfies will depend on individual viewers, but the ambition of attempting it is admirable, and the sequences in which the mythology is revealed are the most visually inventive Chaves has produced.
Atmospheric Craft That Rewards Patience
Chaves learned the lesson that eluded the Conjuring spin-offs: genuine dread requires patience, and genuine dread is far more effective than shock. Last Rites builds its horror through sustained atmosphere — the specific unease of a Vermont winter landscape, the menacing quiet of a community that has arranged itself around something it will not name, and the slow revelation that something has been watching the Warrens for much longer than this film. The Vermont commune sequences in the film's first half are among the most effectively unsettling environment-based horror filmmaking in the series, drawing more from Ari Aster's Midsommar than from the franchise's own jump-scare tradition.
Cast & Crew
Director
Michael Chaves
Screenplay
David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick
Studio
Warner Bros. / New Line
Ed Warren
Patrick Wilson
Lorraine Warren
Vera Farmiga
Drew Thomas
Ruairi O'Connor
Judy Warren
Taissa Farmiga
Producer
James Wan
Original Score
Joseph Bishara
Official Trailer
© Warner Bros. Pictures / New Line Cinema. Trailer embedded via YouTube.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need to watch all the previous Conjuring films first?
Watching the original trilogy — The Conjuring (2013), The Conjuring 2 (2016), and The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (2021) — before Last Rites will significantly enhance your emotional engagement with the film, particularly its final act. The spin-offs (Annabelle, The Nun, The Curse of La Llorona, etc.) are not required viewing and are not referenced in Last Rites. Newcomers to the series will find the film comprehensible as a standalone horror film, but will miss the full weight of what the Warrens' farewell means. If time allows for only one prior film, the 2013 original is the essential preparation.
Is this truly the final Conjuring film, or will the franchise continue?
Last Rites is definitively the final chapter featuring Ed and Lorraine Warren as played by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga. Both actors have confirmed their departure from the franchise, and the film's story is structured as a genuine ending to their arc rather than a setup for a continuation. Whether Warner Bros. will develop future Conjuring Universe films set in the same mythology but featuring different characters — given the franchise's extraordinary commercial durability — remains an open question. The Annabelle and Nun sub-franchises are likely to continue. But the Warrens' story is finished, and Last Rites gives it the ending it deserves.
How scary is Last Rites compared to the original Conjuring?
The original 2013 Conjuring remains the scariest entry in the franchise by general critical consensus, and Last Rites does not surpass it on those terms — few horror films of any era could. What Last Rites achieves is a different kind of horror: less reliant on the extended set-piece jolts that James Wan orchestrated so brilliantly in the original, and more focused on sustained dread and psychological unease. The Vermont commune sequences are genuinely creepy in a slow-burn way that the original's farmhouse sequences were not. The film's most frightening moment — a sequence set in a long-abandoned chapel — is the single best individual horror scene Chaves has directed. Audiences sensitive to atmospheric horror will find it very effective; those who prefer pure jump-scare delivery may find it less immediately satisfying.
Is the film based on a real Warren case?
Like all the principal Conjuring films, Last Rites is described as "inspired by" documented Warren case files rather than being a direct adaptation of a single case. Screenwriter David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick has drawn on elements from several of the Warrens' later investigations — including cases from the 1980s and 1990s involving cultic activity and what Ed Warren described as "oppositional forces of organised evil" — and synthesised them into an original narrative. The film also draws on aspects of Lorraine Warren's own documented accounts of the visions she experienced in her later years, which became increasingly cosmic and less case-specific in nature. As with all the Conjuring films, the supernatural elements are fictionalised and dramatised from source material that is itself contested and unverified.
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