The box-office record-breaking horror hit The Conjuring: Last Rites acts as a de facto finale for The Conjuring franchise, and unfortunately it misses an opportunity that could have sent the Warrens out with a flourish. Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga once again star as the veteran paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren in the fourth Conjuring movie, which features another dramatized real-world haunting.

The Conjuring: Last Rites chronicles the Smurl family haunting that occurred across more than 10 years in West Pittston, Pennsylvania from 1974-1986. While a lot of the real details alleged by the Warrens and the Smurl family were represented in the movie, one of the most significant departures from the true story is the introduction of the mysterious new mirror demon.

The three spirits in the Smurl house were all operating under the influence of the primary demon plaguing the family, but it was the mirror demon who acted as the movie’s true villain. However, the final showdown between the Warrens and the mirror demon revealed a major misfire for the franchise, as they wasted an opportunity that has been brewing since the first Conjuring movie.

The Conjuring: Last Rites Never Paid Off Its Final Boss Build-Up

One thing that The Conjuring: Last Rites does well is establish its villain early, and give it some major context in the lore of the Conjuring universe. The mirror demon shows up right at the outset of the movie in a flashback to the birth of Judy Warren, which the movie implies was responsible for her early and traumatic birth.

We get a brief glimpse of it outside the mirror even, crawling in the corner of the delivery room, appearing as a pale, long-fingered humanoid with small glowing eyes. Lorraine manages to revive her daughter and seemingly ward off the demon through the power of prayer, but with its introduction, the bar is set for it to be a major villain.

It’s even implied that it’s responsible for the terrifying visions of Judy’s youth, which her mother trains her to stave off with psychic focus. That means this particular enтιтy has plagued the Warren family for more than 20 years by the events of The Conjuring: Last Rites, giving it the feel of a true “big bad”, especially given the movie’s status as a send-off for Ed and Lorraine Warren.

After all that build-up, and roughly 80 minutes of really solid haunting horror featuring the symptoms of the mirror demon’s infestation of the Smurl home, the payoff is wildly disappointing. Instead of dealing with a terrifying specter or monstrous demon, the Warrens basically battle against a haunted body-length mirror—literally.

While the mirror demon does possess Judy’s body briefly before manifesting as Judy’s dark and twisted reflection in the mirror itself, the final conflict between the Warrens and the enтιтy that has poisoned their family slowly over the course of two decades is undeniably flat and disappointing, if not downright silly.

The Conjuring: Last Rites’ Ending Misses What Makes The First Two Movies So Great

The Conjuring and The Conjuring 2 are widely considered modern horror classics, even if The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It has more mixed reviews. One of the elements that the first two movies share is how incredible their climaxes are, and most specifically how terrifying their villains are.

The Conjuring introduces the 19th-century Satanic witch Bathsheba Sherman, who manages to possess a family’s matriarch in one of the most spine-chilling possession scenes in horror cinema. It’s a tremendous payoff after the steadily-escalating terror inflicted upon the Perron family.

The Conjuring 2 follows that with paranormal chaos at the hands of the demon Valak, which takes the form of a nightmarish nun. After torturing Lorraine Warren with visions of her husband’s death, Valak nearly manifests it while it adopts its true form, once again adding a terrifying exclamation point to its narrative.

The Conjuring: Last Rites has nowhere near as powerful a payoff, and a huge reason why is that the demon never actually appears. After teases and near-misses, the movie seems like it’s building perfectly towards a big reveal, and that the Warrens will finally come face-to-face with the demon that Lorraine first glimpsed in its true form all those years ago in the delivery room.

Instead, the movie ends with a piece of antique furniture spinning in the air and crushing the leg of Judy’s fiancé. It’s eventually defeated once and for all, not by some elaborate exorcism or intense prayer, but with Judy and Lorraine joining their psychic power and essentially just rejecting the demon’s existence.

It’s not only a disappointing ending to a horror movie, it’s a borderline insulting ending to the franchise. The basic message is that if you don’t believe in demons and ghosts, they can’t hurt you. It’s a meta commentary on the paranormal in general, and feels like it spits in the face of everything that the Conjuring movies have depicted.

It’s a sour note to end the journey of Ed and Lorraine Warren on for The Conjuring franchise, and undoes a lot of the really solid horror action and imagery that had played out in The Conjuring: Last Rites. The supposed finale did plenty to set up the next phase of the Conjuring franchise, though, so this may not be the true ending for the primary Warren narrative.