Insidious:
Chapter 3
(2015)
(SPOILERS) James
Wan had no yen to go further into the Further with the Insidious franchise, departing for Furious 7, so co-writer and supporting actor Leigh Whannell takes
the helm for this prequel, focussing on Lin Shaye’s (deceased in Chapter 1) psychic investigator Elise
Rainier. On paper this sounds great, as Shaye’s distinctive performance was
easily the best thing about the first two chapters, but unfortunately Whannell
has assembled a distinctly underwhelming tale around her, one that offers
little of interest other than joining the dots with the first film.
If we
really cared how Tucker (Angus Sampson) and Specs (Whannell) joined forces with
Elise, that’s on offer to sate us, but Chapter
3 mostly preoccupies itself with the haunting of Quinn Brenner (Stefanie
Scott), grieving and attempting to contact her deceased mother only to be warned
“If you call to one of the dead, all of
them can hear you”. Cue sightings of freaky dead people and getting
poleaxed by automobiles (leading to her sporting dual plaster casts on her
legs, leading in turn to the ickiest scene in the picture, as a possessed state
Quinn smashes off the casts and clicks around on broken limbs). Dad Sean
(Dermot Mulroney, almost as prevalent a thankless supporting player as Dylan
McDermott) is understandably getting worried.
It’s a good
50 minutes before he calls on Elise, though, who has sworn off spook-swatting
due to being menaced one too many times by her own particular antagonistic
spirit. As a consequence, this is a missed opportunity; absolutely nothing
about the Brenner scenario is remotely distinctive or engaging. Even their
lodgings consist of sub-Shining
corridors and telegraphed sound effects, rather than carefully ladled
atmosphere.
There are a
few nice scenes with Shaye, including a sweet exchange where Carl (Steve
Coulter), a fellow parapsychologist, persuades her she should be using her
abilities, and an actually rather great Ripley-esque moment – because it’s
Shaye saying it – where she confronts her demon (“Come on, bitch!”). She also has a masterful way with dialogue that
world curl up and die spouted by someone else (“Help me get rid of the foul parasite attaching itself your daughter”).
Really,
though, Insidious was having problems
enough finding a new story tell in Chapter
2 and, not untypically of the horror genre, Chapter 3 falls too easily back on rehashing the familiar. It’s a
shame, as Wan and Whannell have just the right kind of stylistic sensibilities
for making intelligent scary movies, but choose to squander them with wafer
thin material like this.
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