The plot: Spiritual medium Elise Rainier (Lin Shaye), along with her colleagues Tucker (Angus Sampson) and Specs (Leigh Whannell), has once again been called upon to help with a paranormal disturbance... only this one proves more personal for Elise than before. As she returns to her childhood home, she is forced to confront not only her own past but also a demonic presence that has been influencing events for a very long time.
If this truly ends up being the finale of this
series, it can boast that it managed to wring the best performance out of Lin
Shaye because it is startling how good she is here. Shouldering a lot of
survivor’s guilt and a few figurative skeletons in the closet, she brings the
character that she has built up over the last nine years to a point where it
feels like that journey was genuinely leading somewhere. She’s warm, effective,
likely to make you cry at a few points and maybe even cheer as she gives what
for to the spook of the day. To that end, Sampson and Whannell are still good
as Tucker and Specs, balancing out their more… awkward tendencies, not to
mention Sampson’s latest affront to hairdressing standards, with a lot of charm
and vitality.
Bruce 'Senator Kelly' Davison as Elise’s estranged brother makes for a highly emotional performance, with his on-screen chemistry next to Shaye allowing the rather complex relationship the two have to burst right out of the frame. Credit also to the actors playing the younger Elise and Christian here, as they share a comparable level of finely-tuned rapport as their older counterparts. Spencer Locke and Caitlin Gerard make for some sunnier presences that give the middle of the film some much-needed warmth, while Josh Stewart as Elise and Christian’s father makes for the most heinous character this series has produced so far. No amount of lipsticked-smeared demons and key-fingered creatures (honestly, Javier Botet as The Man With The Keys is pretty damn cool, both in concept and in methodology) can compare to the sheer dickery of this guy.
Sadly, we do not have Whannell in the director’s seat this time around, although he does thankfully return once again as writer. Instead, we have Adam Robitel, who we checked in on with 2015’s woeful conclusion to the Paranormal Activity series The Ghost Dimension. Considering his place in a veritable sardine tin of a writer’s room on that film, where it seems like no good ideas were coming out of it at any point, how does he do at contributing to yet another supposed conclusion to a horror franchise? Well, he kind of falls through the cracks as far as visuals go. He doesn’t show the same fidelity to old-school horror that James Wan did on the first two outings, nor does he show a sense of claustrophobic framing that Whannell did in Chapter 3. This would be fine if he was just standing out and making his own mark on the series except, outside of using the now-tiresome blue/orange colour dichotomy to distinguish between certain parts of the film’s timeline, there’s nothing all that special to be found here in how this film looks. There’s a definite understanding of how to make the tension of a given scene stick, between Robitel’s direction, Toby Oliver’s camerawork (Get Out, Happy Death Day) and Timothy Alverson’s editing (Orphan, Insidious: Chapter 3), but nothing that ends up distinguishing this from any other film in the franchise.
Which is something of a shame because, even though Robitel
only sticks to the series’ standard, Whannell seems to be going for something
greater with his scripting here. Aside from explicitly making the story all
about Elise, meaning that we get a hefty serving of one of this series’
greatest strengths (Lin Shaye’s performance), he builds on the series’ bigger
recurring themes to make for something that, in contrast to the visuals,
definitely stands out against what came before. It still taps into the same
well of family dynamics and hereditary connections to the dead, but this time
around, it feels like it has a very pointed purpose in doing so. A lot of the
film involves coming to terms with the past in a very visceral,
mental-wounds-that-are-still-healing fashion, particularly with how Elise’s
childhood is depicted. When I said that her father is the most heinous thing in
any of these films, I absolutely mean it; very rarely do fictional characters
make me want to see awful things happen to them, but Mr. “If there’s one thing
you’ve been doing all your life, it’s asking for it” certainly fits that bill.
What’s more, because of how that specific pairing informs the rest of the
narrative, this can get incredibly depressing in how it shows these attitudes
and actions repeating over time.
But more so than that, this film strikes a serious chord
with me because it taps into my now-well-established appreciation for stories
concerning ‘The Other’. I brought up Bruce Davison’s most recognised role
earlier because, with how this film talks about prejudice and how those with
‘special talents’ are shunned by society, this can feel like a once-removed
X-Men film at times. However, that’s only the surface of what’s happening here.
Digging in a little deeper, we see not only how that kind of prejudice can grow
and spread through generations, but that not directly dealing with them is what
fosters that growth. Or even worse, trying to fight anger with more anger, another topic I've discussed at length on this blog before.
When this ties into the methods of The Man With The Keys,
we get a more direct look at how these behaviours end up locking us into
perpetuating them. Given this film primarily showing women to be the victims of
the various nasty creatures within the story, both human and demon, it makes for
a decent feminist piece on top of everything else. It’s because of this that
the finale between Elise and the demon is as powerful as it is, combining this
new-found surge of feminine strength with the series’ depiction of parental
figures for one hell of a punch. One that also makes this film’s place in the
timeline (shortly before the events of the first film) feel appropriate and lending emotional weight to the
events of what comes next. For a tentative conclusion to a series, this manages
to close the loop rather nicely and make it feel like this specific progression
was done for a reason.
All in all, the supposed curtain call for the Insidious
series turns out pretty damn good. The acting is solid, with Lin Shaye giving
her all to deliver some rather complex feels, the writing builds on the series’
mythos while adding in some more topical elements to create genuine emotional
resonance, and while the visuals aren’t exactly much to write home about (and
yes, I get the irony in me writing down a statement like that), Adam Robitel at
least manages to make this film feel scary where it needs to. Given this film’s
emphasis on pathos rather than scares, this might turn a few genre fans away,
but for those who have kept up with the series until this point, this is most
certainly worth checking out. I mean, a satisfying conclusion to a film series;
how likely are we to get another one of these anytime soon.
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