Insidious: Chapter 3 (2015)

A prequel to a haunting we have already sat through twice, Insidious: Chapter 3 arrives with the resigned air of a franchise clearing its throat. Leigh Whannell, who wrote the earlier entries, takes the director's chair for the first time and points the camera at a new family: Quinn Brenner, a teenager with a dead mother and theatrical ambitions, and Elise Rainier, the psychic who would prefer to stay retired. Both are women. Neither is a statement. Horror has always handed its screams to young actresses, and casting an older woman as the reluctant medium is a tradition older than the genre's current marketing. We note the demographic composition of the cast, which is very white, and we note that no particular effort was made to alter it. That is the entire ledger on that front.

The film's real investment is grief, which it handles with a sincerity that occasionally embarrasses the jump scares surrounding it. Quinn's longing for her mother drives the plot. Elise's dead husband appears in the Further, whispering encouragement toward suicide, and she recognizes the trick. This is competent emotional engineering, and it never once stops to instruct the audience on how to feel about it. A neighbor with dementia wanders through the corridors muttering cryptic warnings, a device borrowed from every haunted-house picture since the silent era, deployed here for atmosphere and nothing else. The fraud-hunting duo of Specs and Tucker provide comic relief and are revealed as hucksters, which is a plot point, not an economic thesis.

What remains is a serviceable haunted-house machine that understands its own mechanics. It is the third chapter of a Blumhouse property, which tells you the budget was modest and the returns were not. The scares are loud, the resolutions are soft, and the emotional core is genuine enough to carry the thing across the finish line. We have seen worse. We have seen better. We have, at this point, seen most of it before.