Insidious: The Last Key

Decided to finish the Insidious saga with The Last Key, released earlier this year. And like most horror sequels everything’s stretched very very thin. James Wan is obviously barely involved at this point, and Leigh Whannell seems to be in too deep with this project to know what the audience wants to see and what’s actually entertaining.

But it’s not as though I expected Insidious 4 to be an earth-shatteringly good movie. The previous films have degenerated from creepy but mostly effective to little more than a series of jump scares roped together. Elise was a strong character but already spread thin in the last film. This generic foray into her past with unthreatening bad guy, unconvincing stakes and made-up rules leading to made-up last-moment saves was even less satisfying than ghostly headbutts. Nobody seems to care in this movie and nothing is clever or original other than a couple of very brief visual moments that were kind of neat, like a walking figure becoming hanging clothes, or revelations that some ghosts are not actually ghosts at all.

But a couple of kind-of clever moments in a very uninspired full movie is pretty inadequate, and that’s what this film was. Ticks the box of simple, vaguely thrilling horror movie, but does nothing at all to advance what happened in the previous films.