By Keri O’Shea
So here’s the thing: I was all set to start this review by saying I’d volunteered to review Insidious 3 on a bit of a whim, as I hadn’t seen the second Insidious and wasn’t sure how the films would relate either to each other, or to the first one. Well, Ben had to remind me that I have, in fact, seen Insidious 2 – and he knows this, because we went to the cinema together to see it. This is a worry. Either the amount of alcohol I ingested beforehand obliterated all memory of the film we went to watch (possible, and preferable) or my memory is now so piecemeal that it’s decided to dropkick the entire experience, because I can remember nothing whatsoever about the first sequel.
I needn’t have been concerned. In fact, I’m quietly encouraged. Having seen Insidious 3, I now rather feel that my memory is an intelligent storage system, one which simply jettisons anything it deems unnecessary. I’m crossing my fingers that it does the same thing for this most recent offering, too.
The set-up here is via that popular means of reusing elements of a story that may have vaguely worked – The Prequel. So, we start off with a girl called Quinn Brenner (Stefanie Scott) rocking up at the door of erstwhile Insidious character Elise (Lin Shaye); Elise’s reputation as a psychic precedes her, and Quinn wants to make contact with her deceased mother, believing that her mother also wants to make contact with her. Elise’s initial plot-stalling refusals to participate soon give way, though she can’t actually reach Quinn’s mother, but of course there are other entities all willing to step forward as soon as a young girl attempts anything of this sort – and Quinn is warned as much.
She ignores this, obviously, in-between trying to be an actress without successfully learning any lines, hating her (living) family, and showing utter indifference to the Green Cross Code, getting run over and landing herself two of the most unconvincing broken limbs ever to grace our screens. One further downside of the accident is that Quinn momentarily ends up in that dream-zone where the dead do their own thing – the place known as The Further – and some generic spindly-limbed entity decides to follow her back, or possibly was already in the land of the living but needed a signal boost, or something. Who cares? Elise, you’re up.
Elise’s help is required, but she doesn’t actually fully reprise her Candlelit Seance Operative role until the film has been underway for the best part of an hour – which is a shame, as – overblown or not – Lin Shaye is at least an entertaining actress with a pedigree for this kind of thing. But no; in his ineffable wisdom, director Leigh ‘Saw’ Whannell spends most of the film vainly trying to make us interested in the oh-so woebegone family at this particular ghost story’s core, and he fails. The family dynamic, as shown, is unconvincing at best and nothing short of awful at its worst. I mean, I honestly never know in many modern big-budget horrors whether I’m genuinely supposed to empathise with the main characters presented to me or not, but I rarely do. This is hugely damaging when they’re on screen nearly all the time and we’re meant to invest something in what happens next, so the annoying kid brother, the American Apparel heroine who is bizarrely, unconvincingly represented to us as a bit ‘alternative’ and the single parent father who actually has lines talking about his different facial expressions but has none – all of this comes across as filler, just something to labour through in the vague hopes that some sparky, well thought out, creepy moments happen eventually.
They don’t, though. Whilst ‘The Further’ is an idea with some creepy potential which manages a few moments of interest in the first Insidious film, here it’s not explored any differently or used any more creatively than you’ll have seen already. All of the scenes feel identikit – they worked once, ergo they’ll work again: we have the same use of technology, the same characters, living and dead, a family in peril, a brave team of psychics, and any signposting which has been chucked in (in terms of how this film relates to the others) is so heavy-handedly done that you might as well have a klaxon going off every time it occurs, which that generic shrieking sound which gets overlaid over everything essentially is anyway. Oh, there are a few new aspects woven into all the ‘why are you doing that?’ moments, mainly concerning the slightly dodgy obsession here with a helpless nubile teenager in her pants being repeatedly wrestled by a demon who has no concept of personal space, but raising an eyebrow is hardly the same as recoiling in fear. The most creative aspect of this film, really, is in the use of the word ‘prequel’.
Accordingly, have we now seen the end of the Insidious saga? To this I’d answer – do ghosts unfathomably hate electric light? Seeing as Elise’s back-story here really isn’t a back-story at all, rather another version of what we’ve already seen, there’s certainly enough scope to scrape another installment, and if enough punters part with their cash for this, then next Halloween could grant us another case of deja-vu. Personally, the way in which Insidious 3 compounds its many faults and omissions with a sentimental ending so saccharin that I could taste it would lead me to give it a wide berth, and if you love supernatural horror, I’d recommend you to do the same to this one. The buck should stop here. That much I will remember.
Insidious: Chapter 3 is out on DVD and Blu-ray on October 12th 2015.