The great despair of our times can be attributed to horror franchises, for they keep shelling out familiar sights and sounds with each outcome till you’re exasperated enough to meet the fate of one of its many casualties. Insidious: The Last Key is the fourth instalment of the Insidious franchise, and the second in terms of the series’ in-story chronology, following 2015's Insidious: Chapter 3.
As expected, the film milks the jump scares, loud screams and insipid dimness we’ve come to expect from the series, with zero surprises.
A swollen family melodrama takes us into the childhood of scream queen Lin Shaye’s Elise Rainier (she’s played as a young girl by Ava Kolker and as a teenager by Hana Hayes) at Five Keys, New Mexico. A few horror tropes introduce us to her special gift, the demonic father, the angelic mother, and a younger brother fraught with disbelief.
Cut to 2010, Elise must go back to the place with her sidekicks Tucker (Angus Sampson) and Specs (writer Leigh Whannell), to confront the demons of her past and find closure.
The calamity of Leigh Whannell’s script is that it puts multiple threads into the cauldron, without really making an attempt to cook it. There is a sublime twist in the middle, which traces back to the events of Elise’s past, which in turn, carries a potential to turn this horror into a tragedy of towering consequences, tapping sins of the past and atonement.
But the film, mounted as a sequel to the popular horror series, is hardly interested in such possibilities. Instead, it goes for the familiar drill of haunted homes, with flickering bulbs, creaking floors, running shadows, and sudden ear-splitting jolts.
There is even an addition of Elise’s niece who shares her gift, possibly to keep the door open for another sequel. After all, words like ‘final’ and ‘last’ in the title only imply that this is not the last, but last of the many more exhausting sequels to come.
Director Adam Robitel is shortchanged with uninspired material which is less involved in standalone brilliance, and more concerned with deepening the mythology of the series circling the same elements. A visit to this version of ‘The Further’ is strictly for the fans of formulaic schlock, and creepy wit. The horror of it all!
(The writer is a journalist, a screenwriter, and a content developer who believes in the insanity of words, in print or otherwise. He tweets @RanjibMazumder).