Annabelle: Creation

Sometimes a creepy-looking doll is just a creepy-looking doll and no amount of repetition can make the sweet old song You Are My Sunshine even the slightest bit scary.

The film exists simply to get us somewhere we've already been, and so the level of invention in the storytelling declines right when it should be ramping up.

For the first two acts, while Annabelle: Creation concerns itself with little girls checking under beds and investigating things that go bump in the night, it's equal to James Wan's Conjuring films.

Taken set-piece by set-piece, this one's far more effective at giving you the kind of goose-bumpy working-over the creators are going for.

If you can get past the utter, utter stupidity of pretty much everything every character does when faced with spooky peril, there are some effective scares here.

The set-up is promising, and it offers some decent early jump scares. But eventually the thinness of the material becomes overwhelmingly obvious.

Sure, it will still feel very familiar, but I appreciated the practical effects over digital, the keen eye for tension-building, and the patient buildup.

It stops being fun and starts dwelling on pain.

While defusing laughter often accompanies this sort of material, it's best employed when we're not laughing at the film.

While Annabelle: Creation is not on the level of James Wans The Conjuring, the film is still able to stand on its own as a chilling film that not only cements David F. Sandberg as one of horrors best directors today.