RECENT WATCHES: Annabelle (2014)

It is a horror cliché for a reason, I suppose. Dolls are mundane, harmless objects for many people, most associated with little girls and old ladies. The cherubic features of a baby doll should never invoke anything but soft, warm feelings of nostalgia or comfort in most grown adults, right? Obviously, this is not the case, thanks to our old friend, the Uncanny Valley. The painted, unmoving facial features of a doll, when contrasted with the desire to suggest a living being, can curiously produce an unsettling dissonance. Especially when those features become cracked or distorted, a common side effect of age or childhood play times. Since at least 1918, stories of creepy dolls have spread across the globe. The trope got a big boost in 1963, when an episode of "The Twilight Zone" sought to create chills from the smiling, pig-tailed visage of a girl's doll. In what must be a coincidence, Ed and Lorraine Warren would add a plain Raggedy Ann doll to their museum of supposedly haunted artifacts years after that, claiming a backstory suspiciously similar to the "Twilight Zone" episode and giving the doll the same name as a character in the show. These are the humble real world origins of "Annabelle." 

When featured in James Wan's "The Conjuring," Annabelle would be transformed into a grotesque porcelain doll, so obviously evil that you had to wonder why any child, ghostly or not, would want to play with it. Despite the cheesiness of the prop, the Annabelle prologue in "The Conjuring" was well executed and generated a lot of discussion. When Warner Brothers and New Line Cinema realized they might have a cash cow on their hands with this movie, they immediately started work on both a sequel to "The Conjuring" and a spin-off about that fucking ugly doll. With James Wan's frequent cinematographer John R. Leonetti in the director's chair, "Annabelle" would be rushed into theaters a year after "The Conjuring" was minted as a blockbuster. That suggested a slapdash job and Leonetti's previous directorial credits including "Mortal Kombat: Annihilation" – one of the most bafflingly unfinished movies New Line ever put into theaters – didn't dissuade that notice. Neither did the finished film, which received much weaker reviews than its predecessor. I myself ranked it 84th out of the 89 new releases I saw that year. Now that a decade has somehow passed since "Annabelle's" initial release, I guess I have to wonder: Was I perhaps too harsh on little Annabelle? 

While "The Conjuring" was based on an exaggerated retelling of probably imagined events that happened forty years prior, "Annabelle" presents an entirely fictional origin for the creepy collectable. In 1969, med student John and his extremely pregnant wife Mia moved into a new home in the suburbs of Santa Monica, California. Their neighbors are a nice married couple whose teenage daughter ran off and joined a hippy commune. Mia collects dolls and John buys her a rare porcelain lady to complete a gap on her shelf. The following night, their neighbors' daughter returns... To murder mom and dad in an occult ritual meant to summon a demon. They head next door and attack Mia, the daughter – named Annabelle, obviously – slitting her throat above the doll. Mia insists her husband throw the toy out and the couple try to get on with their lives. Strange supernatural events begin to befall Mia while John is at work during the day. When a fire starts in the house, she is rushed to a hospital and gives birth to their daughter, Leah. The family moves to an apartment in Pasadena and life resumes normality for a while. Until Annabelle the Doll reappears in their lives, a demonic force determined to seize control of Mia and her daughter's lives. 

I recalled "Annabelle" as a totally irredeemable experience upon seeing it for the first time in 2014. My embarrassing original capsule review refers to it as "hella anticlimactic." Giving the prequel another look with perhaps slightly wiser eyes, I'll say this much. The cinematography is halfway decent. Leonetti has proven talented in that department, more so than in his thoroughly lackadaisical directorial credits. James Kniest is credited as the D.P. here, only the second time he stepped into that role on a feature film. (Before photographing some Mike Flannigan shows and, uh, "The Bye-Bye Man.") This suggests to me that Leonetti probably had a lot to do with the look of his movie here. Reoccurring shots of the apartment building towering overhead are kind of cool. A sequence where Mia is stalked through a shadowy floor of the building before retreating into the ominously slow elevator has some moody moments. I'll say that one jump scare is mildly clever. A little girl transforms into a screaming adult woman before lunging at Mia through a swinging door. That is executed with some skill. A shot of the doll levitating before a window with Mia's face in the foreground is mildly neat. 

Otherwise, it is difficult to summon much enthusiasm about "Annabelle." You can see what Leonetti and his team are aiming for. "Annabelle" is clearly modeled after "Rosemary's Baby" and "The Omen," the kind of classy demonic thrillers we associate with the late sixties and early seventies. You can tell this by the number of obvious references made to Polanski's masterpiece here. The couple being named Mia and John, foremost. A creepy apartment building, secondly. That the plot hinges on a pregnant woman imperiled by a Satanic scheme, obviously. For long stretches of the film, housewife Mia is left alone at home while her husband is away at work. This is when she is terrorized by ghastly visions and aggressive poltergeist activity. In "Rosemary's Baby," a young wife being trapped in the domestic setting while her husband is out in the world is part of a sinister conspiracy. Patriarchal gender roles and the commonplace settings they create become crushing tools in a ploy to rob a woman of control of her own body. In "Annabelle," the husband is harmless. He's clueless but not malicious. The demonic forces act on their own once summoned. Scenes with creepy kids, a noxious nursery, and the diabolical doll occur without any deeper subversion of these symbols of motherhood and innocence. "Annabelle" motions vaguely at much better movies while only containing a puddle's depth of its own. 

Part of this is because the cast are given extremely routine characters to play. The ironically named Annabelle Wallis plays Mia as a shrieking damsel in distress. Ward Horton is an ineffectual nerd as John. Tony Amendola is melodramatic as the Catholic priest who attempts to help. Another reason is because the script shows all the signs of being quickly thrown together. When Annabelle reappears at the couple's new apartment, Mia doesn't regard this as anything sinister. In fact, she decides to keep the obviously evil doll! Unlikely choices, such as leaving an uncooked tin of popcorn on the stove, moves the story forward. The level of power and ability the apparition has varies from scene to scene with no consistency. Mostly, the type of stuff the film seems to think is scary comes across as fairly hokey instead. A flickering television, especially in 1969, is not that sinister. A literal horned devil appearing is Halloween mask, dollar store shenanigans. A twitchy female spectre creeping around was old hat by 2014. A scare about a truck creaming a baby carriage is telegraphed far in advance and fumbled in execution. As is a similarly stretched out threat of Mia running her finger into her sowing machine. The film constantly teases endangering baby Leah but always wimps out at the last minute, making all of these moments feel like toothless provocations. The weirdest thing about the film's lame excuses for scares is that the titular doll itself, who you would think would be the star attraction, actually has very little involvement in most of the prequel's bugabooery. Annabelle herself is an incidental plot device to "Annabelle: The Movie." 

"The Conjuring," I believe mostly unintentionally, pushed a conservative, ahistorical moral about witches being evil and the family unit, and the Catholic Church especially, being very good. "Annabelle" is somehow more reactionary in its messaging than the film that spawned it. The prequel also has its fair share of treating the clergy as guardians of the righteous against evil spirits. (Albeit ineffectual ones.) Mostly, the film is wrapped up in hysterical fears about cultural outsiders. The Manson family murders are referenced in one scene. The hippy death cult that sets the bloodshed in motion are clearly inspired by Manson's Family and are explicitly more Satanic in nature. The hippies are depicted only as leering, cackling attackers. Their targets, meanwhile, are extremely square, church-going married couples. The message is clear: Sticking to the homestead and embracing traditional family roles are good while defying that is akin to devil worship and deranged murderers. The priest compares mothers to God in one scene, furthering this subtext that giving birth to and taking care of babies is the greatest role women can aspire to. 

Which brings me to Alfre Woodard as the kindly black woman who runs a bookstore and assists Mia in her battle against the forces of darkness. Woodard gets a sloppily included monologue that explains her backstory, which also includes a dead child of her own. This belabored piece of exposition sets up a last minute swerve that exists clearly to get the story out of the foregone conclusion it was pointing towards and making a happy ending. A happy ending for the nice white couple anyway. Not so much for the older black woman, who exists solely to provide much needed knowledge to the pasty protagonists and sacrifice herself for their safety. It goes hand in hand with the film's other messaging. If heterosexual married couples are good, motherhood is great, the Catholic Church are guardians, hippies are evil, and the devil is real, then people of color obviously only exist to serve the white master race. It's very, very weird to see a mainstream studio production pushing a message such as this.

Again, I don't think writer Gary Dauberman, John R. Leonetti, James Wan, or anyone else involved in the film are knowingly raging bigots pushing restrictive roles and messages in this film. I think "Annabelle" was rushed into production by WB to cash-in on the popularity of "The Conjuring" as quickly as possible. It didn't matter if the plot was half-formed, if the script was half-assed, and the subtext was repugnant. It only mattered that an "Annabelle" movie was in theaters a year after "The Conjuring," before the teenagers who buy tickets to these movies forgot about the creepy doll from the beginning of the other movie. The definition of striking while the iron is hot, of getting more product out there to keep demand up and people hungry for more, "Annabelle" is hastily assembled, glossy studio junk with little mind towards art or deeper ideas. But I don't think it's the worst ghost movie glop I've seen in my life either. Annabelle, the doll, is so not-scary as to become goofy. Goofy things are charming, maybe even cute, which means Annabelle herself might be endearing. The movie ostensibly about her beginnings but not really has no such attributes. [4/10]