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I thought the first Conjuring movie was moderately entertaining (for a warmed-up rehash of horror cliches), and was hoping for an improvement the second time around. The sequel could have entertained me by being more about Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga), the paranormal investigators who can’t stop helping haunted families even when their aid poses psychic threats to their own lives. I like watching Farmiga and Wilson (especially Farmiga, who has one of the most hauntingly beautiful faces in contemporary cinema). But they’re only in about a third of the movie this time. And most of their screen-time is spent selling some pretty wretched dialogue and forced turns of character.

Director James Wan knows how to cash in on horror tropes — the creepy toys, peeling wall paper, and gravely-voiced possessed children are all here. But none of it adds up to anything and there’s very little holding the movie together. I waited the entire run-time for a narrative throughline to hang my hat on, and it never came. Without a driving narrative force, the movie gets boring pretty quickly, forcing you into a never-ending series of 7-minute suspense and surprise cycles that made me feel like I was on the most predictable roller coaster ever designed. I mean, when all the scares are played as ecclesiastic moments, you never know when to really, really take things seriously. There are some imaginative moments here and there, but that’s faint praise for a movie that doesn’t work on a macro level.

To put it another way, The Conjuring 2 is like watching two whole hours of Richard Dreyfuss making Devil’s Tower out of mashed potatoes (see Close Encounters of the Third Kind if you don’t know what I mean). At least in Spielberg’s movie there are dramatic peaks and valleys that build to an experience.

With Franka Potente.