For its fourth installment, the Insidious franchise takes another step back in time.
We see one of Elise Rainier's earliest childhood experiences with the other side—and then
we see her as a full-grown ghost-hunter who's made to revisit her past in cruel and surprising
ways.
While the story is mostly a standalone adventure for the spiritual psychic, The Last Key still
draws on the mythology of the series, and features some of the central players of the
franchise in fun and fresh new ways.
Let's take a look at how Insidious: The Last Key explores Elise's devastating backstory
and wraps things up on a note of continuity.
Pattern of possession In childhood, Elise is tormented by more than
just the spirits that occupy her family home.
Her prison guard father is also heavy-handed with punishment, to the point of abuse.
Clearly deranged, he insists he can beat the ghostly visions out of her and fears her supernatural
gifts.
Summoned back to the property in her later years by the home's new occupant, Ted Garza,
she discovers he's kidnapped and tortured a woman in the basement for months.
He claims something has invaded his mind…
"He's in my head."
But he's still ultimately done away with by Specs.
Afterwards, Elise continues to explore and uncover more terrible secrets about the history
of the home, including her own father's similar abduction and slaughter of a woman in that
very spot.
Elise realizes both men were possessed by the demon that terrorized her in her youth,
and instead of getting revenge on her ghost dad in The Further, she decides not to feed
the demon herself.
It's not clear that all of her father's bad behaviors were due to the demonic force, but
he does apologize to her in ghost form before withering back into his spiritual cell.
Weapon of love
The true big bad of the movie is the key monster.
Elise first runs into it in childhood after her father banishes her to the basement, with
a voice summoning her to a keyhole that unlocks the door to the demon's lair.
Her mother is the first true victim of that mistake, as she attempts to rescue Elise from
the basement but is instead strangled by the nefarious spirit while Elise remains in a
state of demonic hypnosis.
Her mother's passing is a tragedy for Elise and her brother.
A warm and loving parent, she'd given him a whistle to blow if he ever felt scared of
Elise's sightings.
As we see in Elise's older years, the whistle was lost for decades—but it pops up during
her return to the old home, and it's used by tortured spirits to guide her throughout
her battle, since the key demon deprives his victims of the ability to speak.
"Shhhh…"
When Elise confronts the demon in its lair, it outmaneuvers her and deprives her of her
voice, too.
But she finds the whistle in time to summon the spirit of her mother, who's able to vanquish
the beast through the sheer power of her love and light.
It's not clear if Elise's mother will ever escape the otherworldly prison below that
house, but she does seem at peace when Elise departs.
Coaching herself One of the most surprising encounters Elise
experiences during her time in The Further is when she runs into herself as a child in
the basement.
She doesn't tell the child version of herself who she is, but does insist that young Elise
use her gifts to help people, despite her father's tyrannical treatment.
If only she'd been able to tip off the child that the girl she spots in the laundry room
at the age of 16 is very real, she might have been able to save Anna.
Alas.
She does at least encourage her to use her nightmares for the betterment of the world—and
to never back down from demons, otherworldly or otherwise.
The family business
Although Elise's brother is none too thrilled to see her again, decades after she'd escaped
their father's menacing clutches, he doesn't have a choice but to welcome her once she
rescues his daughters.
After Elise informs Christian that she found his old whistle in the home, he decides the
relic is important enough to track down.
Problem is, his youngest daughter Melissa is summoned down to the basement by the key
demon, who makes short order of adding Elise's niece to its collection of victims.
Elise senses the attack and returns to the property, promising to find her.
After she's temporarily incapacitated below, though, the other sister Imogen decides to
try her own hand at psychic work and is lulled into a state of hypnosis by Tucker and Specs.
"I can see things too."
She's there on a rescue mission, but it's Elise who ultimately leads the two girls back
to safety, and Christian is grateful for her salvation of his daughters.
Meanwhile, Imogen has now tapped into her own paranormal gifts, and Elise's legacy can
maybe live on through another generation.
And that's very, very important to the franchise as a whole because the movie finishes with
a direct link to the timeline of the original Insidious movies.
Elise dreams about a boy named Dalton being haunted by the red-faced demon we came to
know so well in the earlier installments and sees Renai [like "Renee"] and Josh, lying
in bed and lamenting the unknown that's troubling their child.
Elise awakens to receive a call from Lorraine, who reminds her that she helped her son Josh,
as we saw in the flashback events of Insidious 2, and now the same thing is happening to
Dalton.
That's the catalyst for the events of the first Insidious, of course, when Elise helps
Dalton escape from The Further, only to be strangled by Josh, who's been possessed by
the same demon that haunted him as a child.
Insidious 2 left off with Elise still working her demon-battling magic, following Tucker
and Specs to new spectral assignments.
But with the added element of Imogen, a new medium who can work with Elise from the earthly
plane, the ghostbusting business might not be done for the Insidious team just yet.
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