After the wacky and bungled second film, the state of the Insidious franchise – jack-in-the-box spookshows from the Saw brigade – looked parlous. Insidious 3 takes everything that was broken and fixes it.  This gratifying multiplex-filler does nothing you’d exactly call revolutionary, but lots of things really well. It manages the all-important jump scares with the finesse of a skilled stage illusionist, but it’s the surprisingly sincere emotional core that makes it the pick of the series.  No knowledge of the preceding entries is needed to enjoy what works perfectly well as a standalone chiller: it tells a new tale about a grieving teenager, Quinn (Stefanie Scott), whose attempts to contact her dead mother dredge up a host of unwanted spectres by mistake.  One – the one you would least want prowling your bedroom at night – is a scantily-clad ghoul with a breathing mask, which waves at her from afar, and not in a friendly way. Another, which if anything is preferable company, has no legs or face.  For long stretches of the movie, no one but Quinn can see these, and her harassed dad (Dermot Mulroney) thinks she’s losing her mind. Both actors connect sympathetically with their characters, but the real star of the show is Lin Shaye. She played a supporting part as the medium, Elise Rainier, in the first two pictures, and was flat-out hilarious in the first one, thanks to her let's-just-get-on-with-it way of despatching things from beyond the grave.  Here, she’s elevated to a leading role, and commits to it beautifully, even quite movingly – we may not have seen such a thoroughly fatigued ambassador for human-undead relations since Max von Sydow in The Exorcist.  Directing for the first time is screenwriter and co-star Leigh Whannell, who deserves serious props here, not only for eliciting Shaye’s best performance, but also doing such a shrewd, patient job with the build-up. The film’s peak scares are orchestrated out of left-field and with a kind of scholarly timing: Whannell knows exactly what we might be expecting to happen and when, but he doesn’t just second-guess us, he third- and fourth-guesses.  The film’s a well-equipped machine for pushing our buttons, basically, but it goes one better on the average mainstream horror flick, simply by finding new buttons we didn’t even know we had, creeping up, and stabbing them all at once.
This highly efficient - and surprisingly moving - scare machine elevates the horror franchise to a whole new level