The Conjuring: Last Rites (2025)

The Conjuring: Last Rites is the ninth installment in a franchise about paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, and it carries itself like a farewell tour. The plot involves a haunted mirror, the Smurl family of West Pittston, Pennsylvania, and a daughter with growing psychic sensitivity. The film wants to terrify. It does not want to educate. That restraint is almost quaint in the current marketplace.

This is a remarkably white film, with Shannon Kook as the only non-white supporting presence of any note, and the screenplay makes no attempt to interrogate that fact. Lorraine and Judy Warren are capable women who drive much of the action, but their competence is standard horror furniture, not an argument. There is no LGBTQ content, no racial consciousness, no climate anxiety, no anti-capitalist anger, no body-positive messaging, and no neurodivergent framework. Judy's visions are treated as a supernatural gift and a burden, not as a metaphor for cognitive difference. The Smurl haunting is dramatized as a case file, with no revisionist historical claims attached.

The closest thing to a social thesis arrives through prayer and religious faith, which function as practical tools against a demon. The film does not lecture about politics, economics, or identity. It lectures about nothing. The remainder is a well-oiled scare machine with a rosary in its hand and a mirror in the other. For viewers seeking cultural instruction, the pickings are slim. For viewers seeking a demon to throw furniture, the service is reliable. The ledger of progressive concern stays almost entirely empty, and the film seems untroubled by that emptiness.