The latest entry in this franchise gives one character closure
If you read my last article, you know I have a back and forth relationship with the Insidious franchise. I loved the first film, but thought the second was a little weak. Both were directed by James Wan, but the second came out the same year as The Conjuring and it felt like Wan had used up too much energy on that film and Chapter 2 suffered for it.
The director’s reins were handed over to the series’ writer/co-star Leigh Whannell for Chapter 3. He wisely chose not to continue the story from the previous films, but gave us an uber-creepy prequel to show how the ghost hunting team of Elise, Specs and Tucker came to work with each other. Staying on the prequel track, the story gets more personal in Insidious: The Last Key.
Elise (Lin Shaye) is allowing her teammates Specs (Whannell) and Tucker (Angus Sampson) to live in her house. One day, she gets a call from a man named Ted Garza (Kirk Acevedo) about supernatural occurrences in his home. The address he gives is the house Elise grew up in, on the property of a former penitentiary in Five Keys, New Mexico. During her formative years, her father worked in the prison and, being a death penalty state, many executions took place there.
This meant that there were many ghosts roaming around the grounds. As a little girl, Elise was still coming to terms with her ability to see these spirits. It didn’t help that her father was frightened of her talents, and his fear manifested in extreme anger resulting in regular beatings for Elise, as well as banishment into the house’s bomb shelter.
During one of these punishments, Elise unwittingly set free an evil entity with keys on its fingertips from The Further, the otherworldly realm Elise can travel to in her mind. Now she must return to her childhood home for the first time since she was a teenager and face down demons both past and present, and both supernatural and real.
Insidious: The Last Key is a letdown from its predecessor, yet not as much as Chapter 2 was after the first. Whannell stepped back to merely writer/co-star, giving the directing duties to Adam Robitel, an actor with only one other feature length movie to his directing credits, who does an admirable yet scattershot job with the material.
There are some decent scares peppered throughout, mostly of the “jump” variety, as to be expected with a ghost story. What makes these kinds of scares work their best is set up and atmosphere. Only a couple times does Robitel properly build tension for the jump scare release. The rest come more from nowhere, diminishing the impact.
There seems to be a theme with this movie: It tries something interesting, but gives up part way through the execution. One major case in point is a scene where Elise and Tucker are investigating the house while using a new listening device he has created. When Tucker switches it on, the audio changes to what he would be hearing over his headset. It’s a very creative method of playing with the audience’s senses, but it’s abandoned once they enter the old bomb shelter. I felt it could have added more to what ends up being an average “one for yes, two for no” scene.
The story also feels a little rushed, even though it runs a decent 103 minutes. Elise initially refuses to help Garza because of the address, yet changes her mind a bit too quickly. Other moments and revelations feel the same way, as if Whannell realized he suddenly needed to get the story to a certain point, so he had to wedge a scene into the works.
Something that did surprise me, and that the movie did well, was how it hit certain emotional beats. It opens nicely, with the flashback to the 1950s and the night Elise helped the entity open the red door between realms. It’s a long set up that gives us plenty of insight into Elise’s past. It’s also suitably scary and unexpectedly emotional. Ava Kolker, the young actress playing Elise as a child, gives a gut-wrenching performance that truly tugs at you, and helps set up other emotional moments later in the story.
Over all, Insidious: The Last Key is basically a serviceable entry in this series, and in the ghost story genre, in general. While it has some good, it’s very nearly outweighed by the bad.
