Insidious: The Last Key (Horror, 2018)

So, this is a short interlude to do a review of another horror film, since I am continuously interested in how my attraction to at least certain horror films and franchises (particularly 1408, As Above So Below, The Ring 1 and 2, The Counjuring 1 and 2, Insidious 1 through [now] 4, Paranormal Activity 1 and 2 [3 was all right, and interesting for flipping to to the male character being the one who took the situation seriously, but it also set up the trajectory that, for me,completely derailed 4 and 5], the Babadook, and to a lesser degree but still interesting, Lights Out ... and The Others with Nicole Kidman was good ... but I have no use for Blair Witch or The Purge franchises) fits with my other interests.This one, however is actually a real "review" in the sense that, at the time I am writing this, the film is still in theaters, which is not unheard of for me, but definitely rarer. The film is Insidious: The Last Key (or Insidious 4).

I liked the first three Insidious movies a lot. I liked Patrick Wilson's and Rose Byrne's down to earth couple thing (as I like Wilson's couple thing with Vera Farmega in Conjuring 1 and 2 ... and Farmega's sister is, interestingly, set to play in the The Nun prequel), and I liked the whole family-centered thing. I liked #3 in general because of the Elise character's endearing persona and because, with a deciding factor being the return of the mother to pull with the living in the final battle, the devotion to family was again strong, but beyond that, I also thought it made a development in meaningful chills, meaning horror as critique, in the sickening "affection" posturing of the man who can't breathe in that final battle when he is coddling the girl, almost consolingly, but that is the sickness of it, that he is trying to get her to stay enslaved to him now by choice, to get her to give herself to him rather than simply being taken, because the final choice is up to her: the family encourages and the mother's presence is a big boon, but ultimately the girl has to fight the battle to return to her body ... they framed that false "affection" quality chillingly well.

When I saw 4 (the Last Key), my first impression was that it was not terrible but not great. Not much in the way of jump-out-of-your-skin moments, and I am sure that there are things that could be rightly criticized on pacing. But my reaction now is a bit like when I was a kid and a friend and I went into the huge locker room in the gym building at the college where my dad taught and one of us would hide in one of the full length lockers and the other would start looking to find him, and one time he hid in the last locker at one end of the maze-like run, and I just happened to start at the other end, and by the time I got to that last locker he was in, I had gotten in the habit of opening and closing the doors quickly, and so I opened his and shut it again without noticing he was in there until a few steps away, when it gave me serious chill tingles. And that is what has happened with Insidious: the Last Key: at first I thought "meh ... I still like the character, but the film leaves me unexcited," but then I realized something that sent chills down my spine. Which I think is interesting, because it is very similar to what I now think is the thing itself I have noticed and that I think is a major advance the film makes in doing horror that has social critique potential.

The thing that is an advance in social criticism method is the flipping of the assumption that the oogie boogie is in fact an oogie boogie ... a ghost or a demon or something other than a living and breathing person. And that facilitates the horror that is ongoing in the present in the sense of the horror of what one human being can do to another. Getting used to the tropes as tropes (she no longer got shocked by the ghosts) made her assume that this is just another ghost whose time was past when anything could be done for them ... but it wasn't; she was seeing a real live person, and in the last moment of life, in the midst of desperate hope of escape. And that is the spine chill ... and the stomach turn ... it was a time when something still conceivably could have been done.

It's also a critique of psychological manipulation: the point of my critique here is not that Elise has been complicit in the horror of abuse; it's that the demon and the father used the tropes [the father backhandedly by denying them], BUT they also committed further injustice in the fact that Elise would now internalize the horrific realization as her own guilt, when it wasn't.(This is also foreshadowed in the scene of her thinking her "giving" the key as a child actually opened the door, that she was the one who let the demon in.)

The main "development" quality is criticizing the way a manipulative person can flip even "horror" (meaning real world horror such as perception of abuse) around to being a tool used in perpetuating the horror in spite of some others being able to see that something horrific is there.

There are a couple other interesting things. The way Elise enters into the demon's trap is insightful psychologically: getting trapped in the emotion, the obsessed anger, of doling out the retribution on the father. And I thought the whole key-finger thing was chilling as far as it's potential for using a creepy image (particularly the jerky movements of the demon) and a relatively original image, as far as I know (the key fingers), to portray the silencing of abused/assaulted women as horror. The key in the chest causing coma is not as dramatic and just sort of more mechanically explains the comatose state, and you don't really get an emotional reaction shown because now they are comatose, but the key in the throat is followed by a well-executed performance of the terror of the realization that nobody is going to hear one's screams ... nobody is likely to listen.

I also thought the setting of being in the shadow of the prison where death reigns (through the electric chair always dimming the lights) was a good critique point.

The mother at the end may be a bit deus ex machina. And I would take that as a valid criticism, but I also think that the gain in methodology of social critique as meaning offsets that considerably. There are different kind of horror. There is the kind that makes you jump out of your seat or sends chills down your spine in a single scary image, but then there is the kind of more slowly dawning realization of exactly how insidious a situation is, exactly how horrific are the things that one human being is doing to another on a more subtle but just as damaging level.