ANNABELLE

Mia and John recently got married. She is pregnant and they moved into a new house, a villa in the suburbs. Since Mia collects old dolls, her husband gives her a rare wooden and fabric example that completes a prestigious three-piece series. During the night, Mia hears a noise coming from the neighboring house and asks John to go check: a couple of followers of a satanic sect have broken into the building, killed their neighbors, and are now ready to do the same to them! But the police intervene in time and the two troublemakers are shot down. The blood of one of them, however, enters Mia's doll, which the mysterious killer was embracing. From that moment on, for John and Mia, it is an escalation of unsettling and dangerous events, until the woman convinces herself that the doll her husband gave her is now possessed by an evil force that wants to harm her and her family. Last year, when Warner Bros. brought "The Conjuring - The Summoning" to theaters worldwide, it could not predict that the old-style horror directed by James Wan would generate a revenue of about 320 million dollars worldwide. A "scary" figure if one considers that the film had a budget of about 20 million. A golden goose ready to be exploited properly and while someone is thinking of a sequel in which the ghost-hunting couple Warren will return to action, someone else had already gotten to work to pull out of that film a spin-off product that would be both a spin-off of Wan's film and a prequel. Thus comes "Annabelle", which has as its protagonist the disturbing cursed doll that appeared in the prologue of "The Summoning", actually showing one of the most genuinely terrifying and successful moments of last year's film. But if with "Annabelle" you expect a film about cursed/killer dolls in full, you will be disappointed. Forget Chucky from "Child's Play" and all its derivatives and get out of your mind the malevolent toys of "Puppet Masters", "Dolls" and "Demonic Toys"; in "Annabelle" the doll is the means to transmit evil, but if there had been a rubber duck or a brioche in its place, it would not have changed anything at all in terms of the film's narrative purpose. Rather, "Annabelle" bears the production stamp of James Wan and, consequently, has with it all the peculiarities of his "supernatural" films; moreover, in the director's chair is Wan's cinematographer, John R. Leonetti, and the music is by the loyal (and excellent) Joseph Bishara, who has worked with Wan in almost all of his films. It was clear, therefore, to expect a product that would reflect as much as possible the style of those productions from which it derives so evidently. But, to surprise, "The Summoning" never enters "Annabelle", despite the relationship, and instead we find ourselves remembering on several occasions "Insidious", to which Leonetti's films resemble both in narrative structure and in the presence of a demon with an unsettling and dark look, as well as in the handling of tension scenes. Indeed, the great merit of "Annabelle" is that it knows how to scare and succeeds, therefore, in creating a couple of really effective master scenes, such as the one in which the protagonist is trapped in the basement or the one in which the doll in the corner is moved by a supernatural force. The design of the doll itself is really unsettling and we do not have a hard time imagining that the silhouette of Annabelle will enter the cinematic horror imagination of the coming years. What does not convince about "Annabelle" is the way Gary Dauberman developed the screenplay, which starts from a little original but interesting idea - especially for the idea of linking the origin of Evil to a Manson Family-style sect - but loses itself in redundancies and, above all, an ending not up to the task, which could make someone laugh. In the cast, the good Annabelle Wallis (nomen omen) stands out, who plays Mia, while the inexpressive Ward Horton, who is her husband John, does not convince. Praiseworthy is the old-school direction of John R. Leonetti, who gets forgiven the "almost" unforgivable "Mortal Kombat: Annihilation" and the anonymous "The Butterfly Effect 2". A film that is enjoyable to watch, but "Annabelle" will surely not leave a mark.