Annabelle (2014)
Annabelle: No See, The Doll Is A Conduit | 2.5/5
Written by Noah Dietz: 4/5/2025
Annabelle was a film I had avoided for a long time. When I was five years old, Bride Of Chucky had just come out, and I have the clearest memory of seeing the scarred, burnt-up Chucky doll in some store while my mom was Christmas shopping. I don’t think I ever talked about it, but I remember being both scared of and incredibly interested in what I was seeing. What ended up coming out of that was a weird fear of dolls that stuck with me for the next twenty-odd years. It wasn’t until I saw Annabelle: Creation with a friend that I realized I didn’t have anything to worry about. It still took me another eight years to watch the first Annabelle, but now that I have, we can talk about it.
With the backdrop of the Manson family and Tate murders, it comes as little surprise that cults and satanism are going to be our inciting incident. After a home invasion going wrong, a cultist commits what appears to be ritual suicide, her blood making contact with the doll. Over the course of the film we have some standard poltergeist hauntings. Even after moving from their house to an apartment in the city, we have small things continue to happen, ramping up until the demon channeling through the doll is in swing. There are some fun shots in the apartment during the haunting, but even for only being 93 minutes long, the film tends to drag.
A huge plus for this film—that I wasn't expecting to say—is that it looks really nice. Directed by cinematographer and frequent James Wan collaborator John R. Leonetti, this film manages to maintain a lot more of the visual identity of The Conjuring. While you can and should criticize some of the performances and characters in general, the base of the story feels more straightforward and followable than others in the franchise. Frankly it’s the same plot as most of the Conjuring films, which makes the execution the most important part of keeping them separate. Annabelle might not be the dread inducing, focal point villain that Bathsheba was, but this flavor of haunting doesn’t have the same need for that.
One thing I appreciate is the subtle changes to the doll’s face over the course of things. When Annabelle enters the scene, she is incredibly normal looking … for a porcelain doll. As the film goes on and the haunting becomes more and more intense, we find her face slowly warping to the mean (dare I say evil-looking) face we remember from The Conjuring. While I still wouldn’t want her in my house, her initial form is a reasonably normal example of older dolls you’d find collectors looking for. By the end of the film, however, she’s the Annabelle we all remember for The Conjuring, just a fun thing to look out for as it goes.
This would have probably worked out better if the film trusted us to remember who Annabelle was from the beginning. I don’t need to have the doll held up in my face with a full scene at the front saying, “You remember this, right???” If we had simply started on our story without the Annabelle bookend, the opening scenes could have allowed themselves a little more buildup. This is the path that The Nun ended up taking, though as you’ll see on the 16th, I didn’t think that was quite enough to save it. Like much of The Conjuring universe, Annabelle ends up being a perfectly tolerable film that doesn’t quite hold up if you’re familiar enough with the genre to know what it’s pulling from.