For horror fans accustomed to wandering through acres of dreck for a meager jolt, James Wan is the real deal. The Conjuring 2, the director's return to the horror game after the amiably knuckleheaded Furious 7, is a brilliantly staged, strangely exhausting work of a filmmaker in complete thrall to his chosen genre. This is a movie where virtually every scene is designed expressly for the purpose of causing the viewer's colon to have an out-of-body experience.
Based on the case of the Enfield Poltergeist of the 1970s—with a smidge of Amityville Horror thrown in for good measure—the plot finds devout ghost hunters Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) back in the fray, protecting an English family from the attentions of an extremely creepy and extremely dead man.