Annabelle: Creation

Annabelle: Creation explores the backstory behind the haunted doll first seen in the original Conjuring, with the movie following several characters as they’re forced to contend with the evil spirit’s progressively malevolent maneuvers. Filmmaker David F. Sandberg admittedly does an effective job of establishing a creepy, slow-burn type of vibe, with the promising atmosphere heightened by an ongoing inclusion of elements clearly designed to pay off later in the proceedings (eg that rickety stair lift is obviously going to be put to sinister use in the second half). It’s clear, however, that Annabelle: Creation‘s almost excessively deliberate pacing becomes fairly problematic past a certain point, as Gary Dauberman’s screenplay contains a heavy emphasis on the various tropes one has come to expect from horror flicks of this ilk – with the film’s overlong running time paving the way for a midsection that’s rife with repetitive, familiar sequences (and it doesn’t help, either, that by the time the one-hour mark rolls around, the body count remains almost disastrously low). The haunted-house finale is, likewise, generally entertaining in a padded-out, by-the-numbers sort of way, and it is, in the end, clear that Annabelle: Creation stands as a perfectly fine yet all-too-commonplace example of a contemporary ghost story.

**1/2 out of ****