And contained it was for a year, until Ed Warren (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine Warren (Vera Farmiga) leave for the night, entrusting their daughter Judy (Mckenna Grace) to the care of her babysitter Mary Ellen (Madison Iseman).
After being blackmailed with a dirty secret by her friend Daniela (Katie Sarife), Mary Ellen reluctantly allows Daniela to accompany her babysitting.
This is the build-up to a forced romance that acted as a side plot, which the film could do just as well without.
The good news is that in this outing, some common sense prevails as the humans stick together and help each other as much as they can.
The rest, as they say, is history. Literally. Annabelle is locked up in the artefact room along with countless other old and cursed knick-knacks like a haunted piano, a typewriter that houses a ghost, a wedding dress that turns the wearer violent, and so on.
The plot of the third instalment in the Annabelle franchise does not differ much from the standard: a teenager learns of a paranormal existence and goes out of the way to not just investigate it, but also interact with it.
As can be predicted, the main source of evil is no longer contained.
There are more suspenseful scenes than there are jump scares, most of which follow a pattern of human slows down whatever they’re doing, scary thing appears unexpectedly, human is frightened, human checks for scary thing again, scary thing is gone.
A good thing to note is that there aren’t any overly graphic scenes. In fact, there’s hardly any gore at all.
As for the doll’s scare factor, Gabby Gabby and her gang of Bensons in Toy Story 4 are probably better antagonists.