Several years after the tragic death of their little girl, a dollmaker and his wife welcome a nun and several girls from a shuttered orphanage into their home, soon becoming the target of the dollmaker’s possessed creation, Annabelle.

I’m not gonna lie, I was a bit wary of seeing Annabelle Creation.  The first Annabelle movie didn’t really excite me much. It was a serviceable, by-the-numbers experience that had very little in the way of surprise or suspense. A little too predictable for my taste.  As the lights went down in the theater for this new episode in the life of the evil doll, I was skeptical. This movie was going to have to work twice as hard to impress me.

Boy howdy, did it ever. Maybe even thrice as hard.

Samuel Mullins (Anthony LaPaglia) makes beautiful hand-made dolls in his home workshop to help support his wife Esther (Miranda Otto) and lovely child Bea (Bee?) (Samara Lee). On the way home from church one day, Bea is accidentally killed in a sudden and rather horrific way.  Twelve years later, Mullins and his (now bedridden) wife open their homes to six feisty orphan girls in an attempt to move on and live again.  What could possibly go wrong?

Well, in a remote worn down farm house that has a demonic entity masquerading as a little girl trapped in a secret room  plastered with bible verses, plenty can. And does.

Orphan Janice (Talitha Bateman) is the first to fall under the spell of the forbidden locked room, especially late one night when the door has been left unlocked.  With the audience screaming, “Don’t go in there!” she naturally goes in there to explore Bea’s old bedroom, still looking exactly the way it did the day the poor little girl had died: table and chairs set for tea time, clothes and furniture, a dollhouse that looks like the farm, complete with mini-Bea inside–and THE doll.

You might think that a movie that works with such clichés as an evil doll, a remote house, a forbidden room, and innocent orphans would end up being a tired, formulaic, and, well, clichéd movie as well, but director David F. Sandberg (Lights Out) manages to weave an entirely delightful and intense experience. The movie as a whole is so much better than just the sum of its parts.

Sandberg plays some amazing tricks on us using dark dead spaces of the frame, holding focus (and holding…and holding…) on a completely dark, black doorway and making us hyper-sensitive, leaning in, searching for any shocking glimpse of a face or figure that disappears almost as soon as it appeared.  There are certainly some easy-to-get “jump scares” here,  but Sandberg wisely doesn’t always rely on the easiest way out of a scene.  There are some real, thoughtful choices he makes when building his suspenseful tale: flickering lights slowly unscrewing themselves out of a socket, the glimpse of a pale face in the background of a photo, a camera shot that tracks slooooowly into a darkened hallway.

But Sandberg is not afraid to put his characters through the wringer. Children in this movie are terrified, horribly injured, and killed outright.  The movie is a nice mix of sudden shock and drawn-out dread.

Bateman as orphan Janice, along with Lulu Wilson as her friend and fellow orphan Linda, are phenomenal in their roles. They are the best of friends, always supporting each other, encouraging each other, and their work here is natural and endearing. Keep your eye on these two, they are destined for much success.

Annabelle Creation ends with a very nice tie-in to the first Annabelle movie that seems natural and unforced (writer Gary Dauberman penned both), and also seems to hint at a lateral connection to the upcoming The Nun. James Wan definitely started something intriguing when he made The Conjuring, and Annabelle: Creation is a very worthy addition to that world. Uncle Mike sez check it out!