RECENT WATCHES: Insidious: The Last Key (2018)

When the trailers for a fourth "Insidious" movie started to pop up in late 2017, I can recall my reaction exactly: Oh wow, they're still making these. "Insidious: Chapter 3" was the least successful installment in the series, which means it still made 113 million worldwide against an 11 million dollar budget. While that suggests audiences' appetite for these fog-strewn, supernatural shockers was growing satisfied, clearly Jason Blum and his flunkies felt a little more money could be squeezed out of this one. Leigh Whannell was drawn back in to provide the screenplay for "Insidious: The Last Key," the subtitle suggesting perhaps a degree of finality to this one. With James Wan far too busy with Warrens and race cars and Atlanteans, Adam Robitel of "The Taking of Deborah Logan" would be recruited to direct. Jaded horror fans and casual moviegoers were inundated with thrillers like this by 2018. Blumhouse's strategy of keeping budgets modest and finding release dates with little competition – the first weekend in January, this time – still managed to make the fourth trip into the Further a financially solvent one. 

Following the trend started by "Chapter 3," "The Last Key" is another prequel to the original "Insidious," following medium Elise Rainer and ghost hunters Tucker and Specs as they pursue a career as for-hire paranormal investigators. Ted Garza, a man living in Five Keys, New Mexico, reaches out to the trio about the ghostly activity in his home. It's a home Elise knows well. It's the one she grew up in, with her little brother Christian. Elise's ability to see spirits disturbed their father, who became abusive. Especially after Elise was lured into freeing a demon known as Keyface, that killed her mother. Now in her home town, Elise discovers the demons of her childhood still lurk around, possessing the living and threatening her family again... Including her nieces, Imogen and Melissa, the latter of which share her aunt's powers.

Much like the third chapter in the series, "The Last Key" gets surprisingly far simply by shifting Lin Shaye's Elise into the role of protagonist. While Shaye played second fiddle to a teenage heroine in "Chapter 3," she's the primary star of this one. The warm, grandmotherly aura that floats around her makes Shaye an immediately inviting presence. She's nice! You enjoy watching her help people, all the more because she's helping out of the kindness of her heart. Like Carl Kolchak or Mystery Inc. before them, Elise and her sidekick give the impression of blue collar paranormal investigators. Tucker and Specs brag about the cheesy artwork they paint on the side of their van or use their extremely niche area of expertise trying to impress women. Angus Sampson and Leigh Whannell have complimenting energies, different types of nerdiness and awkwardness that work off each other nicely. You can root for this gang, above all else. They are like a version of the Warrens in “The Conjuring” movies without all the weird baggage.

Like every horror movie made in the last decade, all of the “Insidious” movies have been about childhood trauma and grief. “The Last Key” emphasizes the former detail a lot, digging into Elise's fucked-up background. Her father rejected her supernatural abilities, his close-mindedness going hand-in-hand with a peculiar misogyny. He seems to think that children exist to be quiet and female children, in general, exist to be subservient to men. At the same time, Elise carries guilt around for leaving her brother behind in such an environment. Obviously, throughout this journey, she'll overcome this problem and confront the demons of her past. Perhaps a little too literally, as the second half has Elise encountering the actual ghosts of her past in the Further. However, I'll admit, I do admire “The Last Key” for not cloaking these ideas in allegory. This is a movie about overcoming the horrors of your childhood and there's a directness there I like.

Not that we watch “Insidious” movies for their especially deep characters. These are movies about scary faces jumping out of the dark at us, right? Cinematographer Toby Oliver – Greg McLean's D.P. on “Wolf Creek 2” and “The Darkness” who then became a regular on Blumhouse's horror pics, “Get Out” most notably – focuses more on murky, blue-black shadows over the eerie greens and layers of fog seen in the previous entries. This is an early sign that the film will not focus on the funhouse approach of the earlier “Insidouses.” There certainly are several jump-scares, of shrieking women appearing out of the darkness, but it would seem building a creepy, prolonged ambiance of suspense is the main goal here. This is most apparent in an extended sequence that involves Elise going through a series of suitcase in a spooky hallway, building in a drawn-out way towards one of the better scares in the entire series. Considering the “Insidious” movies tend to get silliest when throwing various monster faces at us, “The Last Key” does a better job than usual of avoiding that. 

By the time we got to “Saw IV,” for one example, the series was buried in continuity and backstory. Despite a sliding timeline that can be a bit confusing – this is, chronologically, the second film in the series – “Insidious: The Last Key” mostly avoids those pitfalls. There's a somewhat obscure lead-in into the events of the first movie. That ridiculous, Lipstick Faced Demon gets a cameo. Some of the rules, of how possession works through the Further, get a little weird. The antagonist is a scrawny, demonic figure played by Javier Botet, seemingly the go-to performer for playing scrawny, demonic figures these days. The so-called Keyface creates sparks when he drags his key-shaped fingertips across any surface, which seems like a blatant call-back to Freddy Krueger. Keyface – silly name, by the way – isn't as intimidating or interesting a villain as that guy. The mechanics used to defeat him are especially blurry, which probably reflects how these movies have never been great about that kind of consistency. 

The general reception to “Insidious: The Last Key” seems to be that it's one of the weaker installments. To be honest, I like these movies a lot more when they focus on the quirky ghost hunters rather than the square Lambert family. Bruce Davidson appears as Elise's brother, bringing a little bit of pathos to his handful of scenes. Spencer Locke and Caitlin Gerard are both decently likable as the nieces, playing off Shaye in a charming way. There's a surprisingly brutal head-crushing scene. Adam Robitel would go on to make the “Escape Room” movies for Blumhouse, which I'd wager this movie is a lot stronger than. You can definitely tell Leigh Whannell's scripts were starting to run out of ideas but this point but an extremely likable cast and a handful of cleverly deployed scare sequences makes it worth checking out. [7/10]