Insidious: Chapter 3 ***
With the Insidious canon, the writer-producer
team of James Wan and Leigh Whannell are building another franchise along the
lines of their time-bending Saw
series. Having established an intriguing multiverse for Lin Shaye’s homebody
psychic to investigate in 2013’s second instalment, this prequel makes an
entirely decent fist of a story – about a bed-bound teenager (the bright,
sympathetic Stefanie Scott) attracting demonic interest after reaching out to
her late mother – which remains necessarily self-contained. Whannell, making
his directorial debut, does a solid job in assembling the nuts and bolts of his
own script, loyally bumping up Shaye’s screen time while fashioning some pleasing,
suspenseful sequences tracking the demon’s heavy-tar footprints through the
Scott household. The envelope remains resolutely unpushed, and the need to
function as a multiplex scare machine precludes the emotionality of The Babadook, yet with its slowburn
reveals and leftfield jolts, it’s been more carefully constructed than most
series’ third chapters.
Insidious: Chapter 3 is now playing in cinemas nationwide.
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