Insidious: The Last Key

The weakest of the Insidious movies, Insidious: The Last Key follows Lin Shaye’s Elise Rainier as she reluctantly agrees to investigate a possible haunting in her childhood home – with the character, who is helped by her loyal assistants (Leigh Whannell’s Specs and Angus Sampson’s Tucker), eventually drawn into a spooky scenario involving her estranged brother (Bruce Davison’s Christian) and his daughters (Caitlin Gerard’s Imogen and Spencer Locke’s Melissa). Insidious: The Last Key announces its less-than-engrossing intentions right from the get-go, as the movie, directed by Adam Robitel, opens with a fairly tedious prologue exploring Elise’s tragic, abusive adolescence and her first experiences with the paranormal – with this stretch suffering from an overt lack of interesting elements that proves fairly disastrous. And while the movie doesn’t improve much once Elise begins that aforementioned investigation (ie it’s all just so familiar), Insidious: The Last Key benefits from a comparatively engrossing second half that boasts a handful of compelling sequences (including a strong scene in which Elise communicates with a whistle-blowing apparition). The film’s overlong climax, however, feels as though it could’ve emerged from any of the installments in this rocky series, and it’s it’s ultimately clear that the Insidious franchise is slowly-but-surely starting to palpably run out of steam.

** out of ****