Insidious: The Last Key review
Another installment, another prequel. The series continues to focus on Lin Shaye’s Elise, this time finding a better connection between character and audience.
Classic movie reviews will contain spoilers.
Insidious: The Last Key
Directed by Adam Robitel
Written by Leigh Whannell
Starring Lin Shaye, Angus Sampson, Leigh Whannell, Spencer Locke and Bruce Davison
Insidious: The Last Key Review
Insidious: The Last Key solves the biggest issue with Chapter 3 by focusing the story on Lin Shaye’s Elise instead of a new family. It can’t, however, outrun the repetitive nature of a franchise in a fourth installment. A better effort than the last entry, The Last Key is a more personal story…but its run out of tricks. Fan service is applied better here…used to connect us to the original film and bring things full circle.
Our story begins with a flashback to Elise (Lin Shaye) as a child. Elise’s gifts freak out her younger brother and anger her abusive father. Her mother is more understanding but dies at the hands of a demon that Elise accidentally unleashed. We revisit this period a few times throughout Insidious: The Last Key. The movie is set inside Elise’s childhood home. Its current tenant is having a ghost problem. And you know who he gonna call.
Insidious: The Last Key is about a homecoming for Elise. It’s also about making peace and finding family. Family here represented by both reconnecting to her brother and his two daughters…and growing closer to her crew we’ve seen in every Insidious movie thus far. The obvious purpose of this is to prepare Elise (and us) for the death that we know is rapidly approaching.
It’s a smart move to center the story on Elise. It fixes the issue with Chapter 3…putting a character we care about front and center. Her subplot in Chapter 3 was the clear highlight of that film…The Last Key makes the whole plane out of the black box. It allows the emotional beats to land much better than they did in Chapter 3. They still don’t pack the full punch that they should…but it’s still better.
Elise’s relationship with her brother has been strained ever since the day she ran away to escape her father’s abuse. She uses her return to her hometown to try and reconnect with him and his two daughters. He wants nothing to do with her…but his daughters are more open to it. The familial subplot becomes the main plot halfway through the movie. It’s Insidious: The Last Key’s best trick. We get a full story about the current tenant wrapped up and then shift into the more personal one.
The second-best trick in The Last Key is using our assumptions about ghostly figures to mask that the person we are seeing is real. It pulls this off twice. Once in the past where modern-day Elise realizes that what she thought was a ghost was, in fact, a living girl her father was keeping captive…and inevitably murders. The same thing happens in the current timeline. The new tenant is keeping a captive of his own. The ghost he wants help with isn’t the apparition of a chained girl in his home…it’s a ghost trying to free her. It leads Elise to the girl and the tenant’s deception is revealed.
Elise comes to learn that the demon she released as a child is corrupting the men in the house to commit these heinous acts. It lets her father off the hook for his abusive nature (his spirit even pops up to apologize in the end). Elise has a final moment with her mother’s spirit (a copy of the last film’s ending) …and the crew heads out victorious. We learn along the way that Elise’s niece has gifts too…perhaps setting up a way to continue the series now that Elise’s story is complete. Of course, that never came.
Insidious: The Last Key is largely out of ways to scare us by this point. There is a good jump scare here and there…but we’ve seen all these enough times to be numb to them. What it does offer is a better story and deeper connection to the main character than the previous prequel. In the end it ties a nice bow on Elise’s journey. The film ends with her receiving a phone call to help Josh’s son…which leads us to the original movie. Although it lacks the impact of that film (or the creative storytelling of Chapter 2) it is a well made and mostly solid entry in a franchise that’s time had come. That is, of course, until it was time to open The Red Door.
Scare Value
Insidious: The Last Key is still very much the Lin Shaye show. That’s still a good thing. Focusing more on her character than ever before, it’s an easier story to connect with than Chapter 3 was. Everything comes full circle for both Elise and the franchise. The formula had run out of steam by The Last Key and a much-needed five-year break would follow. That break ends tomorrow with the release of Insidious: The Red Door.
3/5
Insidious: The Last Key Links
Rent/Buy on VOD from Vudu and Amazon
Buy on Blu-Ray from Amazon
