Annabelle Comes Home (2019)
Annabelle Comes Home: Time For Bed, Annabelle | 3/5
Written by Noah Dietz: 4/23/2025
We love seeing the same opening scene for a 3rd time, don’t we, folks?
Finally, if God is real and cares about me, we’ve reached the last Annabelle movie. This one is more heavily tied into the main timeline than some of the others feel, taking place in the Warrens’ house and featuring Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga reprising their roles as Ed and Lorraine. Due to our location and rogues gallery of haunted items this one feels very reminiscent, for the worse, of certain elements of The Conjuring 2. We once again have the quick excuse that Annabelle is a conduit for other spirits mentioned in the beginning, but it feels like an unnecessary addition to things. Again we have a film that weighs down what we’re supposedly focusing on in exchange for our weird selection of ghosts. A real Spider-Man 3 of a situation to deal with, to be completely honest.
We open on the Warrens returning from acquiring the Annabelle doll, which marks the third time we’ve seen this scene since it was first in The Conjuring back in 2013. This follows with a real-world case of the Warrens being referenced with all the tact of a late-stage Marvel character easter egg, existing solely to remind us all that the doll is an incredibly powerful channeling device. Later, after the events of The Conjuring 2, we’re spending the weekend at the Warrens’. Ed and Lorraine will be gone so Mary (Madison Iseman) is brought in to watch their daughter Judy (Mckenna Grace). Due to a newspaper article about the Warrens in the local paper, all Judy’s friends at school have told her they will no longer be attending her party because of her “weird family.” Mary’s friend Daniela (Katie Sarife) is incredibly interested in what the Warrens get up to, deciding to invite herself over for the weekend in an attempt to make contact with her own deceased father. After breaking into the Warrens’ curse room, she opens Annabelle’s case. This lets the demon using her run amok in the house for a short time, waking up many other spirits who are connected to cases mentioned earlier in the film. Eventually the girls come together to put the doll to bed, just in time for Ed and Lorraine to return and all the neighborhood kids to come to Judy’s birthday party after all.
As I can usually say, there’s some really fun shots in here. The Ferryman vanishing as the flashlight runs up his body is really fun to look at. The lighting in this is a blast at times too, which confuses me since this is the same man who lit The Nun, which I found to be a murky and miserable experience. The way the light glints off the coins gives a cool, eerie energy to many of the scenes. Though there are too many ghosts present in general, all of them are still at least a little interesting. Additionally, our three leads in Judy, Mary, and Daniela are fantastic. All of them hold their own while delivering solid performances and, especially in the case of Katie Sarife, manage to convey the emotions the role requires without ever feeling too corny or forced.
The true problem here is we have a movie full of scenes that don’t really connect. They all have a certain through-line that maintains a higher level of enjoyment than the first Annabelle standalone, but there was also nothing here. This felt like a high-budget Disney Channel spinoff of some other successful movie. Yeah, we’ve got the couple who makes the series work featured in the front and at the end, but in the middle we get side characters and trinkets that might have caught your eye in the mainline film. It’s a Saturday morning cartoon with the approximately $30 million budget that Warner Brothers can afford to give, since all these movies make money hand over fist. I couldn’t stop thinking about the made-for-TV spinoff feelings that this had while writing the quick summary. I could be accused of writing that in too targeted a way to sell my point here, but it’s honestly just how it feels. I can’t think of a single better way than this to convey what this film was like.
All this said, it’s still perfect for teens who are looking for more from their horror. At this point, however, I have a strong feeling that even an inexperienced horror viewer would feel this film was played out by the time they got to this point of the Conjuring universe. It’s not terrible, and among the Annabelle spinoffs it’s still second best, but I hope this is the last one that we see surface.