SPOILER DISCUSSION

1.Naming the primary couple John and Mia feels like a nod to the fact that Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes played the main couple in Rosemary’s Baby.

2.The fire scene starting at 31 minutes effectively utilizes multiple “triggers” in succession to culminate in something special. It starts with John leaving the popcorn on the stove. We see him put the bag there and then leave the stove off.

The next day, we cut to Mia sewing on her machine. Leonetti, up to this point, has shown close-ups of Mia’s fingers against the machine multiple times without letting the tension of the possible accident dissipate. As the suspense from this moment builds, the film cuts to the popcorn bag blowing up unbeknownst to Mia – it’s a ticking time bomb. Furthermore, the scene Mia’s watching on her own television is building up to its own emotional high. As the characters on the screen explode, Mia cuts herself. She goes to deal with the injury and then notices the smoke which culminates with her getting trapped and nearly burned alive by the flames from the popcorn machine.

At no point in the sequence does the tension let up because Leonetti lets each disparate part reach its climax before letting that momentum travel to the next climax and so on.

3.At the 47-minute mark, John agrees that he’s been ignoring Mia and promises to rectify the same with dinner the next evening. The film immediately cuts to the sounds of a record playing a happy tune and we think that the promised dinner is underway. However, a cut to Mia alone at the dinner table reveals that John has left her to fend for herself once again. The undercutting reveals just how hapless her situation feels.

Leonetti cuts to a few shots of her isolated apartment to reinforce her situation before having Mia turn the record off. The camera stays still and showcases Mia leaving the area to clean the dishes in the corner. But then the record player starts to play again and we know that something supernatural is present with her. The camera tracks her as she moves to turn off the record player and deal with the situation; the lack of cuts keeps us trapped with her in the situation.

While the climax of the scene – a gust of wind followed by a visit by the spirit of the female killer – is a bit disappointing in terms of content, the set-up at least allows it to be visceral in the moment.

4.One of the film’s stand-out sequences occurs at the 55 minute mark when Mia goes down to storage. She sees a baby carriage and approaches it before being scared by a demonic entity. She runs down to the elevator in the room and desperately tries to leave the floor but finds herself unable to as the elevator refuses to budge. The repetition of her desperation makes the tension palpable. We can’t leave the scene and are stuck with her in the elevator unable to leave. When she makes a mad dash out towards the exit, we can’t help but be fully invested because we’ve been forced to wait in anticipation to what’s going to happen.

The scene itself was directed by James Wan ^[1] IMDb.com. (n.d.). Annabelle. IMDb. Retrieved June 8, 2022, from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3322940/trivia , but I think that its formal make-up is close enough in feeling, even if lacking in seamlessness, to what Leonetti does in other parts of the film to suggest that the film’s problem’s lie less with direction proper and more with story composition.

5. The ending upends the great things Annabelle does because it refuses to pick what function it wants to serve. The climax opens with John and Father Perez trying to reach Mia to warn her about the true target of Annabelle’s desires: Mia herself. The baby’s soul is completely safe and only Mia can truly be targeted. This sets the third act up Hitchcock’s “bomb under the table” scenario. ^[2]Hitchcock, A. (n.d.). A quote by Alfred Hitchcock. Goodreads. Retrieved June 8, 2022, from https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/728496-there-is-a-distinct-difference-between-suspense-and-surprise-and We know there’s a threat to the characters – a bomb under the table – that the characters themselves are unaware of which imbues the entire scenario with a palpable tension.

As Mia comes to the conclusion that she must sacrifice herself to save her baby, we know that such a decision is the only way she can doom herself and consign her family to a life without her. If Annabelle gets a soul consensually, then the demon has “won” the battle.

Yet, instead of having Mia realize Annabelle’s gambit and act accordingly, the film opts to have Evelyn (Alfre Woodard) sacrifice herself instead to retrieve the baby. The decision to sacrifice runs at complete odds with the warnings repeated above. We’ve been told the “bomb” goes off if someone gives their soul up willingly, but then are expected to believe that the “bomb” does not go off during such a transaction because of the power of sacrifice and faith; this total shift in gears at the very last moment completely shuts down the momentum and is wholly unsatisfactory.

The justification for the sacrifice relies on accepting that Evelyn saw the spirit of her daughter and saw this moment as God’s duty for her, but this interpretation is so forced that even Father Perez’s attempts at saying as much in the aftermath comes off as a bad joke.

That’s not to say that presenting the ending as a dilemma between divine duty and demonic condemnation is impossible; it would just require a level of nuance and depth that film doesn’t’ even the scratch the surface of.