Sure enough, the bell gets rung when the girl’s not around.

Niken’s daughter, for example, loves playing hide-and-seek instead of clapping so her mother has a chance of finding her, like in The Conjuring, she rings a bell.

Instead, The Doll pads its runtime with supernatural shenanigans lifted right out of The Conjuring. Now that the tree is gone, thanks to Daniel, Uci is angry and wants revenge.Īll of that could make for an original-enough, fun-enough horror movie. The doll was hung in the tree to pacify Uci’s spirit, and locals would pray for her every time they drove past. The film sets up a fun duality between Anya and her neighbor across the street, Niken, who believes in “the other world.” Niken recognizes the doll when she visits Anya, and she tells her that the doll was once owned by a girl named Uci who was murdered during a robbery. As Anya says, “you just need to clean her up” and she could be perfectly lovable. Homegirl looks like she started out normal enough, but has been through. The titular doll’s design is serviceably good unlike the film version of Annabelle, which is difficult to imagine any child not being anything but creeped out by, The Doll’s doll is right on the line between believably-innocent and clearly-possessed. One day, the creepy doll he and his coworkers found at the construction site finds its way into his car and comes home with him soon, mysterious sounds and smells fill the home, and Anya goes wild with paranoia at the thought of a ghostly girl haunting her house. Anya is a doll-maker, and Daniel works construction. After Daniel receives a promotion at work, he and his wife Anya move to a bigger house and settle into their new, happy lives. The basic plot of The Doll is original enough.

The Doll is different enough that it could have just been its own thing, but instead it pilfers its structure, various story beats, and scare concepts from the much-better Conjuring films, before finding its footing and ending in a blood-soaked, cacophonous, impressively-nasty climax. Often, though, those movies don’t pretend to be anything but quick cash-grabs of their more recognizable counterparts. (I’ll never forget my hapless high school German teacher telling us he rented Transformers and spent the whole movie wondering when Megan Fox was going to show up, only to find when he re-examined the Blockbuster box that he’d actually grabbed Transmorphers). There are, after all, always knockoffs of popular films. She even makes a cameo in Aquaman! It makes sense that other filmmakers would want a piece of the action. What was originally a Raggedy Ann became a now-iconic creepy little weirdo in James Wan’s Conjuring series and the resulting Annabelle spinoffs her pranks both mischievous and murderous have raked in serious piles of cash since she debuted in 2013. By this point, the story of Annabelle the haunted doll is familiar to millions of people.

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