Insidious: The Last Key (2018)

The fourth entry in the Insidious franchise, directed by Adam Robitel, hands the lead to Lin Shaye, a woman of advanced years in a genre that usually reserves such roles for the young and the disposable. She plays Elise Rainier, a parapsychologist returning to the New Mexico house where her father beat her and locked her in a basement. That is a grim premise. It is also, by the standards of the current cultural ledger, a quiet one. A prologue set in 1953 establishes the abuse, the whistle, and the red door, and then the film moves forward fifty-seven years to let its heroine settle an old account. Franchise horror rarely troubles itself with the cultural questions of the day. This installment does not break the pattern.

The film concerns itself with a demon called Keyface, a red door, a whistle, and a great deal of spirit-world paperwork. There are kidnappings, a hidden room full of suitcases, an abusive patriarch long dead, and a family reunion conducted partly inside a prison dimension. The villain feeds on fear. The protagonist refuses to feed it hatred. This is humanist, certainly, and it gestures toward the idea that cycles of violence can be broken. But the gesture is a plot mechanic, not a sermon. Nobody turns to the camera to explain what we should think about fathers, or ghosts, or the state of the nation.

On the checklist that preoccupies our age, the film is a blank page. The cast is largely white. No character's identity is interrogated for meaning. There is no commentary on race, class, climate, bodies, or neurology. The lead being a woman past sixty is notable casting, not an argument, and the film's interest in her ends where her ability to see dead people begins. What we have instead is a man in a mask of keys, a house that creaks, and a mythology collapsing under its own weight. The result is a forgettable sequel, and a clean one. We score it accordingly.