Movie Review: Insidious Chapter 3

I know, another week, another horror movie.  I don’t know what it is about the summer, but a ton of horror movies tend to come out over the summer, perhaps because kids are out of school and like that sort of thing?  Last week’s Poltergeist was almost laughable compared to this week’s movie.  I’ve now seen all three Insidious movies and without a doubt, this is by far the scariest.  I credit much of that to the Rear Window where the Jimmy Stewart character is trapped in a wheelchair, creating a different kind of scare.

In the very first Insidious movie, the viewer is introduced to a family and a young son who falls comatose for reasons they can’t understand.  In the second movie, the same family is followed through much of the same story, but from a different angle.  In this third movie, much like Annabelle from that was spawned from The Conjuring, this movie takes place before the first two Insidious movies.

The real treat for the movie comes from Lin Shaye, who plays the medium of choice.  In a short article I read about her in Entertainment Weekly, she got a late start to acting and she has done a lot with her fifteen minutes of fame.  The early jitters for her character are surprising as we see her being far more confident and sure-footed in the following two movies.  She also plays the villain in that terrible Ouija movie I saw last year, fun fact for those still reading.

The third movie starts a few years before the viewer is introduced to the Lambert family (Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne).  A young girl keeps trying to contact her mother who passed away a year ago and she has summoned something else to her instead of her mother.  The girl reaches out to Lin Shaye’s character, who initially rebuffs her, but she gets involved without really meaning to.

Without giving away huge spoilers, the movie is scary.  I had my eyes covered for long sequences of the film.  The villain was shrouded and often just out of sight, but this sort of filming made every sequence, practically from the beginning, that much more tense.  Worse yet, because the girl, Quinn, I think, is incapacitated for most of the movie, and so she is either stuck in bed or in a wheelchair and when something approaches, there is nowhere for her to run.  Even though the first movie had this element, it wasn’t told from that perspective.  I normally don’t give such ringing endorsements, but this is one horror movie that delivers and is very much worth seeing.