Insidious: The Last Key is the sum of little effort, disappointment, and bad scares. As the fourth film in the well-established series, I expected to see a quality horror movie but I was surprised when the movie ended because I was still waiting for the climax. It felt as though producers James Wan, Oren Peli, and Jason Blum, who are known for delivering horror/thriller masterpieces, rushed to put something together and feed it to the audience.

The movie starts out with a young Elise Rainier (Lin Shaye) who lives with her mother Audrey, father Gerald, and brother Christian. Gerald who works at the prison as an executioner doesn’t believe that Elise is really seeing ghosts of the people who died on the property, and punishes her by beating her and locking her in the basement. Elise hears a voice telling her to open a door and accidentally unleashes a demon named Key Face who murders her mother. Several years later, Elise is working as a paranormal investigator with her two colleagues, Specs and Tucker. They receive a call from Ted Garza, who is experiencing paranormal activity in the house that Elise grew up in. The team travels to Five Keys, New Mexico to try to fix the situation but discovers that Garza was keeping a girl captive. After reuniting with her estranged brother and meeting her two nieces, Melissa and Imogen, she flashes back to her childhood when she mistook a living girl being held captive by Gerald for a ghost, and abandons her brother fearing another beating from her father. Christian and his daughters go into the house to look for a beloved whistle that Audrey gave him if he ever got scared, but key face abducts Melissa and takes her voice and soul. Elise goes into the basement to look for the red door into the further but discovers suitcases of the girls who were held captive in the years past. As Elise examines a suitcase, she is ambushed by Key Face who takes her into the ‘further’ and leaves Elise’s body in the real world unconscious. Imogen, also having the same abilities as Elise, ventures into the ‘further’ to rescue her sister and Elise.

There was some relative suspense throughout the whole movie but I was not as scared/thrilled as I was prepared to be. All the jump scares where basically in the trailer and I knew they were coming.

“I’m someone who gets scared easily and I didn’t even flinch at some of the scenes. Maybe I’m growing up but it was too predictable,” said Esme McCarthy ‘20.

The screenplay was poorly written and contained a lot of cringy cliches that made me say “ew” several times. The movie theater was filled with a lot of young adults and high schoolers and most of them had relatively the same audible reaction.

“I was so disappointed in The Last Key. This wasn’t an Insidious worthy movie. It was subpar and unsatisfying,” said Camryn Salter ‘18.

Others thought the storyline and the concept was well thought out but not well-executed.

“I liked knowing about Elise’s background and the character’s had a lot of depth to them but the presentation of the characters were lacking,” said Gabriel Regalado ‘19.

If you are an Insidious fan and you must see the movie for yourself, then by all means go watch it. But if you are looking for a good thriller and something to get excited about then Insidious: The Last Key is not the move.