Review- Insidious: The Last Key

Insidious: The Last Key

It’s official. January is the cinematic wasteland for movies. To prove it, Hollywood decides to release Insidious: The Last Key on the first week of January. The Insidious films were complete as a trilogy, so why have The Last Key? Guess the series was inspired by the Paranormal Activity franchise, for which they also released horrible spin-offs after finishing the trilogy. Oops, I meant to say quadrilogy.

If you’re confused with the chronological order of the Insidious films, don’t worry, you’re not alone. Insidious: The Last Key takes place after Insidious 3, which is a prequel to the first two installments, and focuses on the backstory of Elise Rainier, still played marvellously by Lin Shaye. The movie concentrates a lot on the childhood of Elise, which is fine, but sometimes it makes Chapter 3 completely irrelevant. That aside, the beginning does a fine job of introducing young Elise’s ability to communicate with demons and her relationship with her abusive father (Josh Stewart). She has traumatic memories from living in her childhood house and doesn’t even want to call it a home. Unfortunately, she then has to go back to that house to solve a case and hopefully embrace the painful memories from her youth.

Lin Shaye still does a good job playing Elise Rainier even if you can tell she’s phoning it in. She really carried the movie with her performance, even if it’s not anything new from you have seen in previous instalments. It’s fascinating to see her devastation from going back to her childhood and confronting it. The script doesn’t always do her character justice though, because she says convoluted things that the audience will not understand. The more she talks about demons, the more bored you will get. Also, some characters in this film were annoying as hell, especially Elise’s two comic-relief sidekicks played by Leigh Whannell and Angus Sampson. They had no comedic timing whatsoever and were quite useless throughout the movie. Whenever they were throwing jokes, it was very tiring. It felt like the director Adam Robitel was inspired by John Turturro’s character from the Transformers series while casting these two idiots.

Insidious: The Last Key

One thing that’s never going away in the horror genre: jumpscares. Nothing against this particular type of film technique, but the ones in The Last Key were so horribly executed. There was no suspense which made them incredibly predictable. Jumpscares are known to be abrupt, but their timing in this film completely fails and gives moviegoers such an unpleasant and frustrating time at the movie theatre.

Insidious: The Last Key is simply a mess. While Lin Shayne is undeniably the best part, the film was boring, horribly executed, and convoluted as hell. The movie is only an hour and 43 minutes long, but frankly it feels a lot longer than its runtime. If you have always been interested in the series, just watch the first two Insidious films. It’s no secret that The Last Key isn’t going to be the last instalment in the Insidious franchise. What’s next? Insidious: The Next Demon? Insidious: The Last Scare? We might also get an Insidious film in 3-D…

Insidious: The Last Key is now playing in theatres.