Share. Elise Doesn’t Live Here Anymore ... Elise Doesn’t Live Here Anymore ...
Let’s be honest: there’s no release date that inspires less confidence than the first weekend of January, which has recently given us such horror classics as The Forest, The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death, Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones, Texas Chainsaw 3D and The Devil Inside. Yeesh.
So compared to that crop of… let’s just call it “crop”… Insidious: The Last Key is a fairly adequate supernatural horror thriller, with a few decent scares and another great turn by Lin Shaye as the unassuming but deeply heroic ghostbuster Elise Rainier. But compared to all the other films in the Insidious series, and to other horror films in general, it’s clearly a bit of a letdown.
Insidious: The Last Key is the fourth film in the franchise, and the second prequel in a row. The previous entry, Insidious: Chapter 3, revealed how Elise met her comic relief sidekicks Specs (Leigh Whannell) and Tucker (Angus Sampson), and the new film - which isn’t called a “chapter”, a fact which already implies that this is more like a footnote - is all about their first major adventure as an official team.
Elise has only just moved in with her kooky apprentices, but right after they wackily screw up her chandelier (these are the jokes), she gets a portentous phone call from a man who wants her to exorcise his haunted house. The only problem is, it’s the house where Elise grew up as an abused child, and to confront the demon who lives there - a creepy beast with old-timey keys for fingers - she’ll also have to confront her own tortured past.
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One of the problems with movies about ghost hunters is that they’re always stepping into the lives of other people, and they aren’t always personally connected to the monsters that they fight. Insidious: The Last Key tries to solve that little conundrum but actually goes too far in the other direction. Most of the other characters in the film, including the new owner of the house, Ted Garza (Kirk Acevedo), are egregiously underdeveloped. They’re either related to Elise, so we’re supposed to care about them, or they’re not, so we don't.
It’s hard to feel suspense for people we don’t know much about, and Insidious: The Last Key compounds that lack of suspense by being yet another prequel. So the only characters we’re invested in - Elise, Specs and Tucker - already have their futures set in stone. Anyone who cares enough to see Insidious: The Last Key probably also cared enough to see the other hit films in this series, so their ending is a foregone conclusion. And foregone conclusions are rarely scary.
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Still, just when you think you know exactly where Insidious: The Last Key is going to go, Leigh Whannell’s screenplay does manage to throw in a clever new jump scare, and director Adam Robitel knows how to film them well enough to keep the film eerie and brisk. It’s always a pleasure to see Lin Shaye carry a whole movie, and she once again proves why she’s the Insidious franchise’s true MVP. #Elise4Ever
But again, it’s been two prequels in a row now, and it officially feels like the Insidious movies are stalling for time. The Last Key may be somewhat engaging but it’s also sloppy and doesn’t amount to much, when all is said and done, except maybe - and only maybe - to insidiously (ha!) lay the foundation for a new addition to this franchise in the future.
Insidious: The Last Key Dr. Elise Rainier faces her most fearsome and personal haunting yet: in her own family home. Get Deal
Director James Wan and screenwriter Leigh Whannell did quite a lot of things right in 2010’s shamelessly entertaining paranormal thriller, “Insidious.” But as far as franchise-building goes, they made one crucial error: killing off the film’s most memorable character, the unflappably empathetic sexagenarian parapsychologist Elise Rainier (Lin Shaye). For the first sequel, “Chapter 2,” they brought her back in spectral form, and for 2015’s Whannell-directed “Chapter 3,” they made even more room for her by approaching the film as a prequel. A direct sequel to that prequel, “Insidious: The Last Key” finally gives Elise the complete spotlight, and in doing so turns her into something of an action hero, complete with an origin story. Despite the indomitable Shaye’s best efforts, however, new director Adam Robitel is rarely successful in shaking the cobwebs off this increasingly creaky franchise: “The Last Key” is wildly uneven, confused and confusing, and it appears to leave the “Insidious” saga written into a corner yet again.
Largely taking place in 2010, shortly before the events of the first film, “The Last Key” makes ample time for flashbacks, beginning with a 1950s-set prologue depicting Elise’s very unhappy childhood. The daughter of a prison warden, the grade school-aged Elise (Ava Kolker) lives in a creaky house in the shadow of a New Mexico penitentiary, and her budding paranormal gifts are already drawing the curiosity of her skittish younger brother Christian (Pierce Pope) and the ire of her abusive, ghoulish father Gerald (Josh Stewart). In a well-staged early setpiece, Elise finds herself trapped in her house’s basement at night, beckoned by a child’s voice to unlock a mysterious red door, which she does with tragic consequences.
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Back in the present day, Elise receives a call from the new owner of her childhood home, who has been experiencing strange phenomena of his own. Initially reluctant to revisit her traumatic past, she quickly relents, and heads back to small-town New Mexico with her two ghostbuster-wannabe sidekicks Specs (Whannell) and Tucker (Angus Sampson) in tow. Her new client (Kirk Acevedo) bears a noticeable resemblance to her father – he also walks with a Neanderthal’s gait, and does not appear to have done laundry in a fortnight – and Elise’s team has scarcely set up shop in the house before various apparitions begin to literally crawl out of the woodwork. Back in town, Elise runs into her now-grown brother (Bruce Davison) and his two adult daughters (Caitlin Gerard, Spencer Locke). Christian blames Elise for abandoning him when she was 16 – Hana Hayes plays the teenage Elise in flashbacks – and storms off, but it isn’t long before he and his progeny end up back at the haunted old house as well.
Robitel has a steady craftsman’s grasp of the rhythms that make a classic Blumhouse jump scare, but he struggles with the element of surprise; the setups to the scares are so predictable, the question is never if a demon will appear in a particular frame, but simply how many seconds the shot will be held until it does. Very little of the tension-breaking comedy comes off – a half-baked comic subplot involving Specs and Tucker’s attempts to woo Elise’s nieces is cringe-worthy – and the director will sometimes cut away to ominously emphasized objects that turn out to have no significance at all. But to be fair, the script doesn’t make things easy for him. At roughly the midway point, “The Last Key” makes its boldest gambit, halfway pivoting away from the series’ stock paranormal hauntings to horror of a different, if no more novel, variety. The revelation that occurs makes little sense in light of things that have happened literally minutes earlier, and when the film begins to lapse into surreal dream logic in the final stretch, it feels less like a conscious choice than an attempt to avoid accounting for loose ends.
If the film ties together at all, it’s mostly due to Shaye’s undeniable appeal. A veteran character actress, Shaye clearly knows how rare it is to have a role like this at 74, and she sinks her teeth into every scene. Given a line like “My presence draws the spirits out of their dark little corners,” Shaye is too respectful of her character to deliver it with a wink, but nor does she invest it with the sort of bug-eyed intensity that would make it ridiculous. Watching as the simultaneously vulnerable and fearless Elise throws herself into one perilous entanglement after another, you have to tip your hat to the “Insidious” brain trust for giving the character the starring role, but as the franchise’s chronology drifts ever closer to where it all started, it’s sadly clear that the character has nowhere else to go.
There was a point in time when the first weekend of the year was a dead zone for any wide releases. But then 12 years ago, Lionsgate’s Hostel broke through with a $19.6M start, opening the doors to a solid, devoted young audience following the holiday movie onslaught. Such is the case again this weekend as Universal/Blumhouse’s fourth-quel Insidious: The Last Key looks to take in $20M-$22M at 3,000-plus theaters. The Leigh Whannell-scripted and produced PG-13 feature isn’t expected to notch No. 1, but it’s going to put up a solid result. Jason Blum, Oren Peli and co-creator James Wan return as producers with the movie directed by series newcomer Adam Robitel. Through three movies, the Insidious brand has grossed closed to $372M at the global B.O. Previews start tomorrow night at 7PM.
No. 1 will either go to Disney/Lucasfilm’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi or Sony’s Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle which will make between $25M-$26M. For the second day in a row, Jumanji beat Last Jedi on Tuesday, $10.1M to $8M. Last Jedi held No. 1 for the last three weekends, which was the same hold for 2016’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Force Awakens held the top spot at the box office for four weekends in a row through the 2015-2016 holiday stretch.
STXfilms/Mark Gordon Company’s Molly’s Game from Aaron Sorkin is expanding from 271 sites to 1,500 locations with industry estimates pegging its second weekend between $6M-$7M. Pic’s cume through Tuesday stands at $6.55M. Pic’s production cost is $30M.
20th Century Fox/Chernin’s The Greatest Showman is looking at a 30% ease for $10M-$11M in weekend 3. Through yesterday, the Hugh Jackman-Zac Efron-Michelle Williams period musical counts $58M.
Universal/Gold Circle’s Pitch Perfect 3, also in weekend 3, is projected to decline 50% for $7M-8M. Through yesterday the threequel has accrued $71.6M stateside, $100M global off a reported estimated production cost of $49M. All in, the franchise counts over half billion at the global box office.
Next weekend is the four-day MLK period which is the unofficial end to the holiday season as kids officially go back to school after that time. There are four wide entries then: Screen Gems’ Proud Mary, Warner Bros./StudioCanal’s Paddington 2, Lionsgate’s Liam Neeson shoot ’em up The Commuter and the distributor’s Hispanic movie Condorito: La Pelicula.
