The Sleepless Unrest (2021)
Anyone who’s seen the first Conjuring movie will no doubt remember the premise: During the nineteen-sixties a couple with five daughters move into a farmhouse with a mysterious past and haunting ensues. Into the fray come Ed and Lorraine Warren to help exorcise the demons and put everyone to rights again. Well, it’s a new century and stuff is still happening at that farmhouse.
As of 2019, paranormal investigators Jennifer and Corey Heinzen now own the real-life house, and while they seem to be a nice couple, I found myself wondering about their motives; namely, do they want spirits and demons around or don’t they? On one hand, they want the pentagram someone drew in the birthing room wiped out, but on the other, they have two Ouija boards on their mantel in the living room. Hmmm, that’s a pretty blatant contradiction, since it’s kinda hard to get rid of demons while displaying known portals to demonic activity (Christians and witches alike generally consider Ouija boards dangerous).
The film downplays the fact that the Heinzens are paranormal investigators and leaves directors, Kendall and Vera Whelpton, along with investigators Brian Murray and Richel Stratton, to do the dirty work, living in the house for two weeks.
And…whatever happens isn’t much, or at least nothing that can’t be easily debunked. The house is far from being the palatial pastoral dwelling we see in the movie; it is a small, dark, antique, and at the time, clearly unrestored New England farmhouse. Ergo, it creaks. A lot. Everyone jumps constantly at all the random sounds.
They also set up several tests for the ghostly occupants, including a football balanced on a chair in the basement and a static camera in the crawl space. There’s a lot of walking around the woods, with the spirits supposedly guiding the team to the onsite cemetery via radio static. Oh yes, we can’t forget the woods. The group thinks they see lights flickering and when they hit a stick on a tree they claim the spirits are answering them back when the sound is repeated.
Here are the problems with all of this. For one thing, nothing is done in a scientific way and there are a lot of rookie mistakes that are obvious even to the casual observer. They’ve got loads of light and sound contamination all over the place, such as when the group goes around the house and woods with flashlights, which means we see snow and dust falling in front of the camera. The group makes no effort to rule them out as anything but ghostly activity and they don’t stay in any one place long enough to really see anything.
It gets worse. Those lights in the woods could have been the reflection of the group’s flashlights off of an outbuilding or the neighbor’s house. The football could have easily been wiggled off the chair by tying fishing wire or something to the chair leg. The supposed ghostly rapping could have been an echo, since this film was shot in the dead of winter and echoes often happen in wooded places where sounds have lots of ways of boomeranging.
None of this is at all surprising, as the Whelptons, Stratton, and Murray are all veterans of Ghost Hunters, which is, in my opinion, the most boring paranormal show on TV. Among their many indiscretions the cast have been caught faking not just the paranormal aspects of the show but overselling themselves and fleecing viewers out of their money. It took me maybe an episode or two before I switched over to the highly superior and vastly more scientific Ghost Adventures.
I don’t doubt the Conjuring farmhouse sees strange stuff; in fact, the Heinzens’ daughter, Madison has observed unexplained phenomenon which she’s documented on her TikTok channel, but Whelpton and his crew were clearly not the people to showcase the home’s scary parts. It would have served everyone better if they had just shot a straight documentary and left it at that.
The Sleepless Unrest is currently streaming on Amazon Prime. Not rated.
My grade: D+
Principal cast: Corey Heinzen, Jennifer Heinzen, John Huntington, Brian Murray, Richel Stratton, Kendall Whelpton, Vera Whelpton
Directed by Kendall and Vera Whelpton