Well, I've thought about it a good bit and I think the take I'm going with is, "If you dislike this movie, I'd like to hear why."
And the reason that I've come to that is that I (and my two horror-loving friends I watched it with) felt like it was, above all, a completely successful movie. Could there be some even better version of it? Maybe. But here, director James Wan sets out to make a movie on his own terms (now that Aquaman has given him studio-cred) and he made the movie he wanted to make and, taken on its own terms, it absolutely holds up. If you can allow for most of Tarantino's on-screen masturbation you can certainly allow Wan to have this one go at it.
So, what is this movie about?
It begins with something frightening but vague happening at a remote medical facility in the middle of the night. Fast-forward some number of years and a young woman comes home from work, pregnant, to an abusive husband who knocks her unconscious. That night, their home is visited by a malevolent presence and the movie takes off as this presence "haunts" our heroine, Maddie, for the remainder of the film, dragging her along its violent path without explanation. And while Maddie, her sister Sidney, and the police try to understand and stop this bloody rampage, an imaginative Horror mystery unfolds.
If I am being vague, it is because it is fun to let this movie do its thing. The story may seem obvious at times and at others perplexing, but it is a fun story and Wan must have had a great time with this. While my initial notions of just what the hell was going on proved to be correct by the end (though I admit, my imagination did not go quite as far as Wan's did), the journey to get there took me through several periods of doubt and wondering and the way that Wan unravels this story really rewarded us all in the end. My friend Amy just loved it. I don't blame her, there was a lot to enjoy.
I will comment first on the lead actress, Annabelle Wallis, who I have never seen or heard of before, but who carries the narrative with a challenging performance. I mean, this is pretty crazy stuff to happen to a character and she keeps it grounded but also stretches out with real emotion at times. You need to sympathize with her character for this movie to work but the character must also be strong and she delivered on both fronts. Also, as in any Wan movie, you have to be able to convince the audience that a bunch of mumbo-jumbo should not invoke eye-rolling and she pulls this off. She's tough but also weak and she conveys real terror when it's needed.
But the star of this movie, clearly, is James Wan.
This really feels like his Tarantino movie and by that I do not mean that he copies Tarantino in any way other than saying, "It's ok for me to make a movie totally for fun where I take all homages to all the things I love in Horror and throw them in a blender then take whatever comes out and make it work." There are direct and indirect references to a number of directors here from more obvious Bava lighting references to Carpenter to another director that I will not name because it will give up the ghost, as it were, but you guys will know once you get to the end of the movie. Wan doesn't care if you think the character should really do that, or if that would really happen, or if this bit even totally makes sense because Argento and Fulci never cared and neither should you.
And that's what I would say about this movie. If you are willing to just take the ride with Bava, Argento, Fulci, Tarantino for that matter, like so many of us do, then give Wan the same license here because, whether you like all of his successful Horror films or not, he's better than most to begin with and now he really just stretches out and lets it fly. Yet unlike those directors he still delivers the story this time and it's a good one.
Is this a new favorite for me? I dunno, I'd probably need to watch it again, and maybe I'm just won over by someone with studio-backing trying to deliver something that's not so formulaic in the genre. But to dismiss this film, honestly, I think is to be disingenuous. I look forward to some discussion of this with people who generally don't like Wan as well as those who do and those, like me, who fall somewhere in the middle.