Anyone who cares enough to see Insidious: The Last Key probably also cared enough to see the other hit films in this series, so their ending is a foregone conclusion. So the only characters we’re invested in - Elise, Specs and Tucker - already have their futures set in stone. It’s hard to feel suspense for people we don’t know much about, and Insidious: The Last Key compounds that lack of suspense by being yet another prequel. They’re either related to Elise, so we’re supposed to care about them, or they’re not, so we don't. Most of the other characters in the film, including the new owner of the house, Ted Garza (Kirk Acevedo), are egregiously underdeveloped.

Insidious: The Last Key tries to solve that little conundrum but actually goes too far in the other direction.

One of the problems with movies about ghost hunters is that they’re always stepping into the lives of other people, and they aren’t always personally connected to the monsters that they fight. The only problem is, it’s the house where Elise grew up as an abused child, and to confront the demon who lives there - a creepy beast with old-timey keys for fingers - she’ll also have to confront her own tortured past. Elise has only just moved in with her kooky apprentices, but right after they wackily screw up her chandelier (these are the jokes), she gets a portentous phone call from a man who wants her to exorcise his haunted house. The previous entry, Insidious: Chapter 3, revealed how Elise met her comic relief sidekicks Specs (Leigh Whannell) and Tucker (Angus Sampson), and the new film - which isn’t called a “chapter”, a fact which already implies that this is more like a footnote - is all about their first major adventure as an official team. Insidious: The Last Key is the fourth film in the franchise, and the second prequel in a row.

But compared to all the other films in the Insidious series, and to other horror films in general, it’s clearly a bit of a letdown. So compared to that crop of… let’s just call it “crop”… Insidious: The Last Key is a fairly adequate supernatural horror thriller, with a few decent scares and another great turn by Lin Shaye as the unassuming but deeply heroic ghostbuster Elise Rainier. Let’s be honest: there’s no release date that inspires less confidence than the first weekend of January, which has recently given us such horror classics as The Forest, The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death, Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones, Texas Chainsaw 3D and The Devil Inside.

Insidious the last key movie theater