Movie Review – Insidious: The Last Key

Insidious: The Last Key (2018)
Written by Leigh Whanell
Directed by Adam Robitel

Much like the continuity of Saw or the Fast & Furious franchises, Insidious became a tangled-up non-linear film series. This particular film takes place after Insidious: Chapter 3 (the earliest film in the timeline), though The Last Key starts with a flashback that is the furthest point back in the timeline thus far. That honor used to belong to the prologue of Insidious: Chapter 2. The Last Key takes place around a year before the first film and focuses entirely on the backstory of Elise, the film’s somewhat main protagonist. As I have said in all these reviews, stating unequivocally who the main character or villain is in these films is utterly impossible as they flail around from picture to picture.

In 1953, Elise was a child living with her family in Five Keys, New Mexico. We learn that her ability to see ghosts is something her father punishes her for brutally. During one bout of punishment, Elise is in the basement, and a red door that shouldn’t be there appears to her. The little girl opens the door and is briefly possessed by a demon, resulting in her mother’s death. Jump to 2010, and Elise (Lin Shaye) works with Specs & Tucker (Whanell & Angus Sampson) in California. They receive a call from a troubled man in New Mexico who believes his house is haunted. It turns out this was Elise’s childhood home, and the evil present is one she is familiar with.

We learn that Elise ran away from home, leaving her little brother Christian (Bruce Davison), who has resented her ever since. The psychic discovers a female spirit she encountered in her childhood that seems to have a sinister connection to Elise’s father. A living woman is found inside, leading Elise and her allies to realize the man who called them is a serial killer, and the police get involved. Elise’s two teenage nieces enter the house and are taken by the demon from her past, forcing her to follow and face down the truth about her father, the horrible secret that has been kept hidden all these years on the periphery.

On paper, this concept is alright. It could be named Insidious: Origins as it primarily concerns Elise’s childhood and how she became intimately familiar with the Further and tormented spirits within. However, the film takes this hook and wastes it in a way that no other film in the series really has. This is a slog, committing the cardinal sin of bad horror movies: it is boring and never scary. I give them some credit for introducing something new in The Key Demon, but nothing interesting is done with the character, and everything about the film falls completely flat.

The Last Key feels like the longest entry in the series, but it’s pretty short. What makes it drag on is the seemingly aimlessness of the script. The movie tries to figure out a new angle to approach the story every few scenes. It never devotes enough time for character development beyond the surface level. They try to make this story tie into the original film in some of the most ludicrous ways. Were you still wondering what Dalton saw in the attic in the first Insidious film? This one answers that by using the silly time-bending properties of the Further. He apparently saw Elise leading her nieces through limbo to escape. Elise opens the red door, and we’re supposed to infer that the lipstick demon got into the Lamberts’ lives that way. Again, this series insists on lore but never explicates it.

I do like Elise being the main character of this franchise. It’s equivalent to making Tangina (Zelda Rubenstein) the protagonist of the Poltergeist series, which would have been a more brilliant move for those films than what they actually did. It would be good to give Elise interesting stories to interact with, but they do not. Whanell insists on treating these films like a funhouse at the state fair. It’s jumpscares with no bite to them, a fear of keeping the rating PG-13 so they can get the middle schoolers in the seats. 

Also, for as many films as Specs & Tucker have been in, we have yet to get any character development for them. I’d love to learn more about them if the script could do something intriguing. Their relationship with Elise has the potential to be engaging and complex. Again, Whanell is just cranking these out using a formula and not even a good one. The most we get out of them here are being comedy relief nerdy creeps and hitting on Elise’s seemingly underage nieces. Great. 

My big question four films into this franchise is: What is the point of Insidious? What are these movies’ goals beyond low budgets and moderately decent opening weekends? I guess I’m naive in thinking that people might make horror movies in Hollywood because they genuinely love the genre. The scares are feckless, and the human relationships are shallow as hell. Nothing about the interactions between Elise and her brother felt like an authentic human moment, which was a shame because both Shaye & Davison are very competent character actors. This is an actual line of dialogue to give an example of how lacking in nuance and craft this script is:

“When we were young, you terrified me with tales of a monster that lay behind the red door. Then you walked out that door, leaving me with the real monster, who was our father.”

Whanell has found a new low in quality. The guy is really good at networking and pulling favors because his ability to write a movie that is, at minimum, fun is severely lacking.