Which makes I nsidious: The Last Key a mixed bag. The follow-up is at its worst when it indulges in the reliable franchise tropes and at its best when it strains at the boundaries of what you expect from an Insidious film. With Adam Robitel ( The Taking of Deborah Logan) at the helm, The Last Key looks distinctly different from the previous films (Wan directed the first two, Whannell directed the third), but there's also a unique quality to the story this time around (again penned by Whannell), which wisely leans in on Elise Rayner ( Lin Shaye's fan-favorite medium), who has unexpectedly emerged as the ghost-hunting hero of the franchise. It was a good gimmick a definitive crux of the Insidious mythology and visual vocabulary (and a distinctly low-budget one at that.) Now, three films later, the Insidious universe hasn't grown much (neither have the budgets), and each new trip into the Further feels less alive, less imaginative, and certainly less frightening than the one before. The Further has gone about as far as it can go. As introduced in James Wan and Leigh Whannell's playful paranormal romp Insidious, the inky black realm of spirits and demons known as the Further once offered a cheeky subversion of the standard haunted house yarn, where Wan's creepy creatures could crawl out of the dark and mug at the camera with abandon.
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