The two youngest girls, however, prove effectively resourceful dealing with the ever-more powerful demon. Sigman’s Sister Charlotte, although a resolutely reassuring presences for the girls, remains ill-equipped to deal with Satanic visitations, and Mark Bramhall’s Father Massey makes too few appearances to offer much support. The scripting falls short, however, in setting up the fundamental conflicts between religious faith and demonic possession that resonantly characterized the events surrounding the doll in The Conjuring and subsequently Annabelle. Mullins, however, deters them from entering the locked room across the upstairs hall or the bedroom where his incapacitated wife has retreated from the world. While the older girls sleep together in a spacious communal room, they banish less mature Janice and Linda, who end up with a bunk bed in the sewing room once dedicated to creating doll costumes. Polio-stricken and wearing a leg-brace, young Janice ( Talitha Bateman) seems particularly uncertain about the move, but her best friend Linda (Lulu Wilson) tries to reassure her that Mullins, a former toymaker, and his wife will look after them. Still remorseful over her passing, they offer shelter at their sprawling California farmhouse to a group of six girls from a local Catholic orphanage and their guardian, Sister Charlotte (Stephanie Sigman).

After deploying the requisite jump scares that get events in gear, the helmer settles into measured pacing that deliberately maneuvers the characters into mounting imperilment while gradually revealing the magnitude of the threat facing them.įirst, however, he firmly establishes the narrative baseline for the emergence of the preternaturally disturbing doll by situating the film 12 years after tragedy strikes the Mullins family when Sam (Anthony LaPaglia) and Esther’s (Miranda Otto) beloved 7-year-old daughter Annabelle dies in a tragic, strikingly staged accident. As he did with his assured debut in Lights Out, Sandberg demonstrates a deft affinity for the elaboration of horror conventions, as well as the expansion of the Conjuring universe.

Annabelle 2 review