The Conjuring: Last Rites

Right away the film gives you something specific to worry about: a haunted antique mirror first encountered by the Warrens in 1964. That small object turns out to be stubbornly, horribly portable — the kind of prop a horror movie can chew on for two hours and make feel like an omen.

Michael Chaves directs with the kind of patience this material asks for; it's a 135-minute story that moves between an origin scene and a later family crisis, and it keeps returning to the same haunted object until you feel its weight. The movie centres the Warrens — Patrick Wilson as Ed, Vera Farmiga as Lorraine — and folds their long personal history into a fresh, later-day case.

And there’s another angle: the Warrens are not lone investigators in their twenties anymore. The story follows that original mirror into a new household, and into the life of a daughter named Judy, who becomes the unexpected hinge between belief and danger.

The connective tissue is simple and reliable: a family moves into a new house and discovers they have brought a problem with them. In 1986 the Smurls relocate to West Pittston and, through an ill-judged gift, the troublesome mirror comes home.

The family are at the end of their tether and, in desperation, go to the press to make noise and find help. That draws a priest into the story and, crucially, pulls the Warrens back toward a case they’d hoped to avoid.

Attempts to remove the mirror escalate into direct harm: when Ed, Jack and Tony try to get the thing out of the house, Judy becomes suddenly and dangerously ill. That failure pivots the plot from investigation to rescue, and forces the Warrens — retired from full-time work — to step in despite everything they have to lose.

Ed is the practical half of the Warrens, the person whose job it is to make religious procedure and physical rescue meet the messy realities of a haunted house. The film keeps reminding you he's the one people look to when things get grim — and that matters because the stakes are personal, not just professional.

We see Ed at different stages of life — there are younger versions of him in flashback — and that lineage gives his choices weight. He isn't just a hobbyist demon-hunter; he’s a husband and father whose life threads through the film’s family theme.

Ed’s role also underlines how the story treats community: he’s part of a team that includes friends and local figures, and his presence anchors the film when the Smurl household unravels. Important scenes — like a birthday party where personal relationships shift — place Ed at the centre of both family and crisis.

So Ed matters because he’s the bridge: he negotiates the ordinary and the supernatural, and his steadiness is the film’s counterpoint to the mirror’s chaos.

Beneath the house-clearing and the exorcism-style set-pieces, the movie keeps returning to family. The Smurl household — multiple generations under one roof, four daughters and a dog — is written as a single organism that the haunting slowly unpicks.

That domestic thread ties directly into questions of belief. The Warrens’ involvement is not just about proof; it’s about whether people will listen — and whom a family can turn to when terror isn’t believed or is even exploited for attention.

Home is treated as both sanctuary and vulnerability. A domestic accident — a light falling during dinner — is one of the film’s early shocks; it’s small-scale, but it signals that the danger lives in the ordinary moments that make a house a home.

And there’s a side-note about exploitation, too: the family go public because they’re exhausted and need help, which shows how trauma can be used and misused once it leaves private life. That choice complicates the idea of help as purely benevolent.

This is a film released in 2025, and it sits squarely inside the raft of 2020s horror that revisits older material with a contemporary eye. Being a 2025 entry matters because it brings an ongoing franchise’s history into present-day storytelling choices.

Calling it a 2020s movie isn’t just chronology; it explains why the film feels concerned with continuity — family lines, returning objects, and the consequences of earlier encounters. The decade’s appetite for sequels and legacy stories is the reason Last Rites leans on both past and present.

Put simply: the film exists because the 2020s are a period in which horror often looks backwards to energise new scares, and Last Rites is one of those attempts to make history feel immediate rather than quaint.

The movie’s focus on a large, multigenerational household still reads clearly. The Smurls’ cramped family dynamics and the way household responsibility spreads across different characters is a choice that holds up: family conflict fuels the plot rather than just dressing it.

Its insistence that a home is not automatically safe is also durable. The decision to try and contain the mirror by bringing it back to the Warrens’ house is a plot move that remains narratively satisfying because it keeps the threat tied to people rather than spectacle.

Where the film might feel of its time is in how readily it moves between public exposure and private terror: going to the press to find help is a plot device that still resonates now, when trauma and attention can be dangerously entangled.

All told, the story’s bones — family, fear and the compromises people make to keep one another safe — are the parts that age best.

People who grew up with this universe will remember the movie for the way it ties a haunting back to a specific object and an origin scene. That mirror — first encountered by the Warrens decades earlier — becomes the franchise’s tangible through-line.

There are a few set pieces that stick: a domestic accident that spikes tension, a priest drawn into the story who meets a grim fate, and the recurring pattern of visions that connect Judy, Lorraine and the past. Those moments give the film an emotional memory beyond its jump scares.

Crucially, the movie closes loops that fans care about. The mirror’s remains are kept, and the Warrens’ family life — including Judy’s later marriage and the couple’s quieter future moments — gives the story a sense of continuity rather than reset.

So Last Rites endures because it treats franchise material as family history. That makes it a film people return to when they want the warm-and-creepy mixture this series has specialised in.

Yes — with a rider. If you care about horror that treats family and faith as the real battlegrounds, Last Rites delivers. It roots its scares in relationships: a birth that is nearly lost, a daughter who senses things no one else can, and a household slowly unravelling under pressure.

It’s a 2025 film that wants to be both a continuation and a close portrait of domestic crisis. Michael Chaves gives us a long, deliberate 135-minute story that trusts the Warrens’ mythology enough to make the human cost matter.

The movie isn’t for someone who wants a breathless parade of shocks. It’s for viewers who prefer their supernatural horror to feel consequential — where destroying the mirror and keeping its pieces in an occult museum means something about memory, responsibility and closure.

Bottom line: watch it if you like horror that keeps family at its heart. The Conjuring: Last Rites is one of those films that rewards patience; it’s not just about what jumps out of the dark, but about who’s left holding the light when the mirror is gone.