We return again to the Insidious franchise, because I will get to the latest entry in this series before April if it's the last review I do (it won't be, but sometimes it feels like it). Of course, Insidious: Chapter 2 ended with ghost Elise still working with Specs and Tucker in their paranormal investigations, but continuing on with that story arc would probably have proven to be overly complicated and difficult to film without annoying its audience. So they decided to go in the other direction and make Insidious: Chapter 3 a prequel.
A teenage girl, Quinn Brenner, goes to visit Elise Rainier in the hopes of having Elise help her contact her mother, who had died 18 months or so earlier of cancer. Elise is unwilling to help, however, as she is suffering from depression since her husband's death and also fearing for her life because of visions of a woman in black who tells her that, if she continues to contact the dead, the woman in black will kill her, although she does tell Quinn to stop trying to contact her mother by herself. Shortly thereafter, Quinn is distracted by a strange figure outside her apartment building one evening and is hit by a car, breaking both her legs. House- and bedbound, Quinn starts experiencing sinister and threatening supernatural phenomena, centring around a figure of a man wearing an oxygen mask who becomes known as "The Man Who Can't Breathe". As things become worse, Quinn's father calls in paranormal investigators Specs and Tucker to try to help, but things become worse as Sean realises they are frauds. Elise comes out of her retirement to help Quinn, but will she have returned in time to save Quinn from the spirit haunting her?
Insidious: Chapter 3 feels more like a movie made to fill in some of the gaps and backstory of a series, rather than a stand-alone movie itself. We get callbacks to the Bride in Black, the Darth Maul/Lipstick-Face Demon and Elise's dealing with Josh Lambert as a child (and considering most of these were in the last movie, it's not really like we needed to be reminded of them). There's also the introduction of Specs and Tucker and the explanation of how they ended up working with Elise (which I did actually appreciate as I'd been wondering how they ended up working together in the first place) and some more backstory for Elise regarding her history with the Bride in Black (which, of course, was conveniently not mentioned in the first Insidious; a clear sign that they came up with more and more of the plot as they made the sequels, rather than having everything plotted out ahead of time). And my gods, that's a lot of brackets in one paragraph.
I actually found myself feeling quite empathetic towards Elise in this movie. Her depression over the death of her husband resonated with me, for obvious reasons, and I could fully understand her desire to draw away from the world after his death, countered with her desire to try to help people with her psychic gifts. It's not too often that you see films portraying things like grief and depression in a way that the audience can connect with, and so I feel this deserves a mention among everything else in the film.
Overall, however, Insidious: Chapter 3 isn't really all that good or memorable. We learn pretty much nothing about the evil spirit du jour, The Man Who Can't Breathe, other than the facts that he once lived in the building and likes to take women's souls for his "pets", and while a comprehensive backstory for a movie's antagonist isn't exactly necessary, I felt that the film missed something in telling us that he used to live in the building and then never investigating that any further. And Insidious: Chapter 3 also suffers from the common ailment of many horror films today - all the good parts got put in the trailer, so there's actually very little to hold the attention when you're watching the actual film. Key scenes of the movie - Quinn getting pulled out of her bedroom window, for example, or the admittedly wince-inducing scene where she breaks her leg casts and walks on her badly broken legs, bones cracking with every step - are thoroughly spoiled because someone in Marketing apparently didn't have enough faith in the movie's name power alone to pull the audience in. But it was still enough to get it another sequel/prequel/Oroborous-like entry in the series...
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