Paranormal Activity 2 (2010)

Paranormal Activity 2 arrives as the second installment of a franchise that built a modest empire on the spectacle of a bedroom door opening by itself. It is a prequel and a sequel at once, set two months before the events of the 2007 original and concluding after them, a timeline that rewards patience and a spreadsheet. The Rey family installs security cameras, a demon takes a proprietary interest in the infant Hunter, and the German shepherd suffers first, as dogs in this genre always do. For those of us who grade films on their social consciousness, the ledger comes back almost entirely blank. There is no agenda here, no argument, no sermon. There is a basement, and something in it.

The single entry of any note is Martine, the family housekeeper and nanny, who senses evil in the house, burns sage to clear it, and is promptly dismissed for her trouble. She is Latina, and the film never remarks upon the fact. She functions as a plot device equipped with a cross and a working Latin vocabulary, present because the story requires someone who knows things. This is incidental casting, the kind that predates the current era of deliberate representational arithmetic, and it registers as a faint historical curiosity at most. The remainder of the cast is white, and the demon holds no stated opinions on the matter.

What the film offers instead is craft, or something adjacent to it. Roger Ebert, no friend of the enterprise, granted it one and a half stars. It opened at number one, broke a midnight record, and frightened audiences who queued for it after dark. It never once instructs us on how to live. In an age of cinema that treats the viewer as a congregation awaiting the benediction, there is an austere purity to a picture that simply wants to ruin your sleep and then leave the room without a word. We score it accordingly, and we sleep poorly regardless.

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