The conjuring II review

 Set in a gloomy North London council house in 1977, “The Conjuring 2” is a work 

of British kitchen-sink realism in the guise of a supernatural thriller: Call it Ken Loach’s “Poltergeist,” or perhaps “The Exorcist” as imagined by a young Mike Leigh. The actual director is James Wan, who has followed up his superb “The Conjuring” (2013) with another virtuosic exercise in mobile camerawork and moldering production design, tethered to a story that handles its characters and their working-class milieu with an unexpectedly grounded, sensitive touch. Generous with jolts but devoid of gratuitous bloodshed, these are the rare horror movies that seem more interested in how people live than how they die.

The sequel picks up several years after the events of “The Conjuring,” which introduced us to Ed and Lorraine Warren (played by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga), a real-life married couple who devoted their lives to investigating the paranormal, most famously the Amityville Horror in 1976. Chillingly re-enacted here in a prologue worthy of “In Cold Blood,” that notorious case took a terrible toll on the Warrens, and has left Lorraine especially reluctant to leave their New England home to chase yet another haunting. History and Hollywood, alas, have left them little choice.

Loosely based on a series of wall-rattling, furniture-throwing and thoroughly hair-raising events that gripped the London borough of Enfield in the late ’70s, “The Conjuring 2” takes its time flying the Warrens across the Atlantic. (A bit too much time, given the film’s generous 134-minute length.) The Enfield demon likes to get to know its victims: first Janet Hodgson (Madison Wolfe), an impressionable 13-year-old whom we first see fiddling with a homemade spirit board, and then her three siblings, and eventually their single mother, Peggy (the excellent Frances O’Connor), who’s already at her wits’ end trying to keep food on the table.

The terrors that befall this struggling family are nothing you haven’t seen before: chairs that rock of their own accord, a TV that suddenly switches channels (never more scarily than when it lands on Margaret Thatcher), guttural voices and possessed toys and doors that go bump in the night. But Wan has a gift for investing even the creakiest cliches with shivery élan. He has always been a versatile connoisseur of genre thrills (his credits include “Furious 7,” the original “Saw” and the two “Insidious” movies), but there is something about the Warrens’ case files that pushes his filmmaking into the realm of the rhapsodic.