The Insidious franchise has launched some fascinating characters over the course of its eight-year, four-film run, each ghostly and in any other case. Since her debut in 2010’s Insidious, Elise Rainier (Lin Shaye), medium extraordinaire and cleanser of specter-infested dwellings, has ranked among the many better of them. The fourth providing of the horror sequence, Insidious: The Last Key, guarantees to delve into Rainier’s tragic backstory, inspecting the lengths she’ll go to so as to banish the demons of her previous (each actually and figuratively).

The film opens with a horrifying flashback to Rainier’s childhood dwelling. Her household lives close to a big jail, the place her abusive father works as a corrections officer. When he’s not at work or falling asleep in his glass of whiskey, he’s making an attempt to beat Elise’s clairvoyance out of her. She communicates with spirits anyway, together with these of a younger boy trapped in her room and the ghost of a person simply despatched to the electrical chair for homicide. As if all of that weren’t traumatic sufficient, she finally ends up unwittingly unleashing a terrifying demon by unlocking a mysterious door in her basement, which finally ends up killing her beloved mom.

Fast-forward to 2010: Rainer and her found-family sidekicks Tucker (Angus Sampson) and Specs (Leigh Whannell) are working their very own ghost-busting enterprise out of her dwelling. Things take a flip for the additional weird, although, when the crew reply a misery name from a person dwelling in Rainier’s childhood dwelling. Not solely should she cope with the entities plaguing the resident of the house—each lifeless and alive—she should additionally face the ghosts of her previous within the type of her estranged brother Christian (Bruce Davison) and his two daughters (Caitlin Gerard and Spencer Locke).

Conceptually, the movie is kind of fascinating; regardless of its heavy-handed symbolism of actually exorcising one’s private demons, the skeleton of Rainier’s backstory has a lot to supply, and is laden with themes of household, heredity, breaking the cycle of abuse, and acceptance. Unfortunately, it’s simply that: The barest bones of a narrative, with so little substance that not even the least demanding followers of the franchise will really feel glad. Additionally, the demon, whose identify is outwardly Keyface (inexplicably—it has keys for fingers, not on its face), isn’t fleshed out. That’s disappointing, because the lore behind the monsters is an space the place producer James Wan and screenwriter Leigh Whannell often excel. Plus, the demonic entity seems to be about as snort-worthy as its identify sounds.

Though Shaye acts her coronary heart out as fan favourite Rainier, her stellar efficiency alone isn’t sufficient to hold this film. It simply feels drained, turning to low-cost, predictable bounce scares for the occasional viewers freak-out and counting on sufficient unoriginal, heteronormative comedian reduction to make your eyes roll out of your head and onto the ground. Even the franchise’s often fantastically creepy netherworld, the Further, seems to be boring and half-baked this time round. The excellent news is that at the least the movie is pretty quick, clocking in at simply over an hour and 40 minutes.

Wan is clearly devoting most of his artistic energies to The Conjuring franchise lately, as Insidious: The Last Key feels prefer it’s scraping the underside of the Further for the previous couple of box-office gross sales. Hopefully this exhausted sequence can now be laid to relaxation, and Wan can simply give attention to making high quality horror.