The Conjuring 2 builds up and up and gets you in its grip, which is what the best horror can hope to do.

Rating: 8/10 (12 June 2016)

James Wan is a big fan of horror. It's not always a surefire thing when a creator is someone who is so connected with a form of entertainment (see also from this opening weekend Jones's Warcraft), but if a filmmaker is in tune with the material he's in love with and it works on all cylinders, there's few pleasures to match it in mainstream cinema. This is a major release (done on a "medium" budget of 40 million) and it's done by someone who's clearly a geek for 70's horror, but in a way that is... classy. And scary as all hell; it's not often to use the almost DVD-cover level critic line but, really, The Conjuring 2, if you're open to it, will scare the s*** out of you.
Wan's become so saavy with how to deal out suspense, and it comes down to how he paces things. This isn't a short movie, and it's longer than a lot of other movies of its genre at 134 minutes. This is to the film's benefit, as it gives a lot of time to build up the characterizations; Wan gives us the two narratives of this family in England, on poverty row basically, and how the 11 year old girl is traumatized repeatedly by this undead entity named Bill and Lorraine Warren (Vera Farmiga's) own visions of a demon in a nun's outfit going after her and killing Ed (!) (this in part attached to that little known case in Amityville, NY). We get so much time with the both sides that by the time the Warren's come to England the movie's halfway in, and it's time to get to the meat of the story.
A lot of what impresses me with The Conjuring 2 isn't so much the elements that we're familiar with by now when it comes to demonic-Christian-drenched horror: we know that the people will come in to the house with the crosses out to get the ghosts or demons or whatever-you-remember-from-The-Exorcist out, and that there will be characters flailing about in the air and objects flying across rooms and terrified characters. What matters is execution, and Wan and his cinematographer and production designer (this IS the 70's!) makes everything palpable and pop. When a little girl is hiding under the covers and Wan switches to a POV of the demonic entity coming in to the bedroom and towards her bed, it feels terrifying because of how all of the shots are paced and cut together and how much we believe this young actress (Madison Wolfe as Janet Hodgson, outstanding especially in the quieter moments like on the swing with Lorraine when they meet).
It's a terrifying trip into the darker recesses of the human soul, and it also comes down to how Wan makes sure to depict the people and places with a degree of honesty in the drama that is outside of the junk/baby food modern horror audiences are used to. It might be a lot sometimes to ask for quality acting, or a budget higher than 5 million, but it does make a difference, and here Wan takes his time with them and it's clear they had preparation before they stepped into a story that involves family and love at the core. I liked that part of it too, that it emphasizes the bond of a family, or a married couple, in the face of evil and demons and the afterlife. So while it deals in tropes of the genre - the audio recordings that reveal more than we first heard, the "trick" video footage, the otherworldly inner "voice" taking over a character (in a real, deeply troubling psychological sense than just the surface one too) - it doesn't cheapen what's happening to them.
I felt invested in this family, which also features a compelling performance by Frances O'Connor as the mother of the family, and it pays off in set piece after set piece, paced out with wonderful bits for character development (including an acoustic Elvis performance by Patrick Wilson!), so that by the time the gigantic, thunderstorm climax comes we can still rock with the over-the-top punches that, of course, didn't happen in the "based on a true story". And yes, the climax is a little too long and features a CGI character that goes too far. But I can forgive these flaws because of the other 2 hours that came before it, which comes close to the likes of The Babadook and It Follows and even The Witch as far as digging deep into what makes people tic and drawing out the atmosphere of things like a room or a hallway or a flooded basement, and getting terror by simply holding on a shot sometimes for long enough for it to take on another meaning (i.e. Ed talking to "Bill", back turned, in close-up with the ghost out of focus but still in sight).