Determined to keep Annabelle from wreaking more havoc, paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren lock the possessed doll in the artifacts room in their house. But when the doll awakens the room's evil spirits, it soon becomes an unholy night of terror for the couple's 10-year-old daughter, her friends and their young baby sitter.
Horrors are definitely back in fashion at the moment, and James Wan's Conjuring universe is churning them out at an incredible pace. While The Conjuring had great critical success, the spin-off films associated with it have been less consistent; some have been downright awful. They have certainly gotten the formula down for jump-scares. That gradual draining of sound while a character wanders around in the dark, before turning or opening something and being scared by something screaming at them, accompanied by some excessively loud music.
It's a formula that works well, and if you watch it in the cinema, it will certainly have the hairs on your arms standing up at times and will definitely make you jump. It's all done by successfully taking advantage of our instinctual survival skills when we become anxious in a dangerous situation and sound, movement, or touch would startle us (and hopefully helps us avoid being eaten by a predator).
But is that enough to make a good film? This is the issue with Annabelle Comes Home; there is practically no plot at all. It effectively boils down to "girl touches things and now three girls are trapped in the house and must survive". That is about the same amount of plot as you get from a slasher flick, except there you actually get some good gore and a proper stalking threat.
In the entire film, only one character has backstory or motivations. Combine this with the lack of plot, and the film is simply a series of unconnected jump scares that are hoping to introduce enough new characters for more spin-off films. If you are after a fun horror that will make you jump, you will certainly still have fun, and the tension and suspense will be thick throughout the whole film, but afterwards, there will be nothing that will make you want to watch it again. Nothing that would make you buy the Blu-ray or DVD. This horror is good for one time only.
The premise seemed interesting. When you include the Warren's room of cursed objects, and restrict the film to the house, one would hope for a lot of creativity and a lot of possible directions for the film. Instead, we have a few "main" new threats with no backstory or motivations, whose role in the film is simply to scare. It feels like a cheap remake of the 2001 thriller Thirteen Ghosts, with no gore or story.
This is just a haunted house attraction with some pretty bad CGI at times. There is a certain enjoyment in watching this with a group, so you can laugh at the jump scares and groan at the decisions that the naive characters make. But there is no substance to Annabelle Comes Home, and this is likely the weakest portrayal of the titular character that we have had to date.