While most of the kids are mean to her, Judy seems to have lucked out with her affable babysitter Mary Ellen ( Madison Iseman)-the charming teenager happily signs on for the task to look after the troubled kid while the Warrens take off on an overnight trip. A totally normal kid considering the circumstances-who amongst us would have turned out okay if we were raised in a haunted house by demonologist parents constantly making the headlines?-Judy gets bullied in school all the same, having trouble even recruiting enough friends to come to her birthday celebration. After an eventful car ride that announces the severity of Annabelle’s menace, the Warrens decide to contain the doll in a blessed glass case in their residence, away from the eyes and ears of their precocious 10-year-old daughter Judy, played by the soulful “ Gifted” actress Mckenna Grace with astuteness beyond her years.

In this installment by debut director Gary Dauberman (the scribe for the earlier two Annabelle movies), we pick up exactly where the opening scene of “The Conjuring” left off. If only the half-baked story could also meet our expectations, or at least match the logic of the previous two “Annabelle” films. In a way, this is the chronological “ Annabelle” movie we all secretly wanted while watching “The Conjuring” years ago it is actually surprising that it took nearly half a dozen sequels and underwhelming byproducts like “ The Curse of La Llorona” or “ The Nun” to show us what happened when the Warrens added another item into their growing family of locked-away demons. Nevertheless, it is an important set up for the latest and only sufficiently creepy franchise spinoff “Annabelle Comes Home,” which takes that same genie out of the bottle some years after the nurses got rid of it. I realize this context reads a bit like homework as most “something-something universe” summaries often do.

Annabelle 2 review