Trying to live their lives, a troubled family with a slew of issues surrounding them begins to experience a genuinely unnerving amount of supernaturally inflicted dreams and hallucinations that eventually force them into seeking out a former practitioner of black magic to help them.
This was a fantastic effort with quite a lot to like here. One of the main selling points here is the generally solid and straightforward setup that provides a spectacular starting point for the later supernatural hauntings. The first half here masterfully sets up a genuinely intriguing storyline where each of the family members is shown to have a worthwhile psychological issue that would make them open to the supernatural which includes the numerous victims throughout here. From the grandfather who's battling guilt over a failed euthanization attempt on his terminally ill former wife, an aunt unable to bear children, the father coping with how he got ahead at work, and a daughter who's targeted by a demonic being to the point that it openly possesses her, this one takes the idea of the family being targeted to the point of generating a study baseline for the later scenes to have a strong emotional depth. These scenes, while still focusing heavily on deformed demonic beings appearing out of nowhere and screaming in someone's face before realizing it's all a dream, still manage to get some effective moments here. A fantastic attack on the daughter where she sees shadows outside her room taunting her to the window before being attacked by her sentient hair to the point where she finally gets herself free to realize she's stuck in an underground tunnel with the demons is a chilling sequence, as is a later one where the victims seated at a table are subjected to various hallucinations while attempting to recover dropped utensils. Other big scenes, including when a prepared meal seemingly begins to hint at a message only for things to get turned sideways, a chilling encounter with a series of blood-covered dolls chanting a psychologically unnerving taunt in unison while crawling towards them, or a series of flash visions to show the demonic expert as an expert in what he's doing, all come off nicely enough as well leading into the final fight between him and the rest of the demonic entities which offer the usual series of impressive antics and chilling visuals. These all provide quite a lot to enjoy here while there are some slight issues here keeping this one down. The main factor against the film is a seemingly common one that's emerged in the last few entries in the franchise that gets repeated here in the construction of the jump scares as punchlines to dream sequences. Almost without fail, this one goes for a repeated tactic involving the victim being subjected to a terrifying ordeal involving genuinely creepy and chilling visuals haunting them only to wake up at the last possible moment realizing that everything was just a dream. It was a feature that had crept into the last few entries in the series and is one that's repeated here, making it seem like again we're going down a familiar route of a family dabbling in the black arts and getting haunted for it. That leads into the other slight issue here where it brings up a fellow member of the franchise from the past and makes it seem like they're important to the story only to have them disappear from the film for nearly an hour to deal with the family so that the reintroduction feels awkward and clumsy as we've forgotten about them for so long. These aren't too damaging and are the main issues to be had here.
Rated Unrated/R: Violence and Language.
