Geek of Oz

Author David Mitchell once charitably said of the film adaptation of his novel Cloud Atlas, “any adaptation is a translation … and I believe a degree of reinterpretation for the new language may be not only inevitable but desirable…”. So indeed were my sentiments about Peter Jackson’s stripping back of (and in many places adding to) The Lord of the Rings books to create his masterful trilogy concluded some eleven years back. The abandonment of plot-irrelevant or dramatically redundant scenes (novel fans will understand this to mean most notably Tom Bombadil or the Scouring of the Shire) and the embellishment of the novel’s only lightly-treated romantic plotlines served to create a film that was tauter and more emotionally engaging. Suffice it to say, I believe straying from the source material isn’t always heretical butchery; often its just good, audience-minded discretion.

Taking its genes from 2011’s Insidious , James Wan’s latest offering The Conjuring favours nerve-stretching tension building to pant-wetting jolts over the torture-porn style pioneered by his first film Saw . While there’s nothing particularly original in the idea or the execution, in this case the usual ingredients are put together well and the overall result is a taut thriller with plenty of atmosphere and the right amount of thrills.