Insidious: The Last Key, directed by Adam Robitel and written by Leigh Whannell, is an iconic horror film of the #MeToo moment. While the film certainly has some failings as a horror film: it’s not terribly scary and the pacing seems a little uneven, it is eminently worth watching for two reasons: its centering of the story of Elise Rainier (Lin Shaye), whose compelling character is developed for the first time in the franchise; and its explicit rendering of men’s (sexual) abuse of women as what is truly monstrous. The Last Key puts women and women’s experience of abuse front and center, and all credit to Adam Robitel for making another horror film that features a complex older woman and that uses genre film to explore real horrors: he is the director who gave us the brilliant The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014) starring the wonderful Jill Larson as a woman struggling with both Alzheimer’s and the supernatural.
Elise (Lin Shaye) talks to her young self (Ava Kolker)
The Last Key opens in the past, with Elise as a young teen struggling with her abusive father, who punishes her when she gives evidence of her “gift.” Elise always believed she unlocked some kind of door that let in a demonic force that killed her mother, and that brought down such severe rage from her father that she felt she had no choice but to run away, thus abandoning her younger brother.
Decades later, in the present of the Insidious franchise, Elise is asked by a man named Ted Garza (Kirk Acevedo) to come and rid his house of what he is sure is a demonic presence. The house is Elise’s childhood house, the house she ran away from many years ago. Elise, Specs (Leigh Whannell), and Tucker (Angus Sampson) arrive, only to discover that whatever else may have been haunting Garza, he himself is the principal horror. He has abducted a local woman and chained her in the basement for months, routinely abusing her.
Elise (Lin Shaye) and her brother Christian (Bruce Davison) rescue Christian’s daughter, Melissa (Spencer Locke)
Venturing into the Further to learn more about her past and her own entanglement in Garza’s story, Elise discovers that her father had also abducted a woman and kept her chained in the basement of the house. Indeed, a woman Elise had seen as a child—and whom she had believed to be a supernatural presence—was in fact a flesh and blood woman who had fleetingly managed to escape her chains. As Elise discovers who her father really was, we get a seemingly benign shot of multiple suitcases that is a truly chilling moment of horror. Indeed, at every turn in The Last Key, what might be purely supernatural in another film turns out to be evidence of very real horrors.
There is a demon in Insidious: The Last Key, then, but it is inexorably manifest across generations as men who abduct, chain up, and abuse women. The demonic in this film is male power and male violence. It is literally male hate that feeds the demon. As Elise says to it: “My father was your puppet. I’m not going to feed you any more hate. You can starve.” Labeling the hatred and rage to which men seems particularly vulnerable as the demonic, Insidious: The Last Key joins other recent horror films that have represented the toxic brew of masculine power, violence, and hatred as monstrous, films such as Green Room (Jeremy Saulnier, 2015), Desierto (Jonás Cuarón, 2015), Don’t Breathe (Fede Álvarez, 2016), 10 Cloverfield Lane (Dan Trachtenberg, 2016), Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017), and The Shape of Water (Guillermo del Toro, 2017).
You can read about James Wan’s 2011 Insidious and race here.
Insidious: The Last Key is available on Blu-ray:
And also streaming:
