Insidious 3 is meant to take the audience back to the beginning, before the haunting of Lambert family and before Elise Rainier (Lin Shaye) returned to working within the ghostly darkness.

It takes a moment to get over the initial discomfort of not having Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne running around screaming and crying but then the audience are introduced to Quinn Brenner (Stefanie Scott, who does a really great job capturing the audience and making them feel as she does), a teenage girl whose mother has recently passed away and her father, Sean (Dermot Mulroney) who relies upon his daughter to fill her mother’s shoes and look after her younger brother and their home. Right away, to show the audience this is the same Insidious they have come to love, Quinn visits Elise to try and contact her mother. When their conversation turns dark and the voices start to threaten Elise, she realises that she mustn’t allow Quinn to try and contact the other side because otherwise she will bring an unwanted danger back with her.

All Quinn wants, is to leave home and move to New York to join an acting school but because she is forced to become a maternal figure. She doesn’t spend enough time learning her lines for an audience and worries, fumbles and ultimately feels like she fails. An accident, post audition, leaves Quinn somewhere between this world and the next and with her life in the balance it could really go either way. But she comes back and returns with a ghostly presence. Between cracks in the ceiling, knocks on the wall, shadows in the windows and general nightmarish fare, she realises that everything is not as it seems. Sean soon becomes worried for his daughter, especially when he also starts to see the repercussions of the dead hanging around. He finds Elise and persuades her to come and help Quinn, to bring her back into this world. Soon the dream team come together and the audience learn where Tucker (Angus Sampson) and Specs (Leigh Whannell) came from. They monitor for ghosts, they move into the darkness, Elise contacts those who threaten the Brenner’s world and a lot of shaking happens.

Unfortunately, the reason Insidious 3 doesn’t quite have the charm or the scares of the previous two outings is that the story simply isn’t as intriguing. By this point, the audience are pretty clued up about how all this ghost hunting works and whereas the first Insidious was a game changer and the second furthered that story, this chapter seems somewhat dull and flat. It has a little to do with the loss of Wilson and Byrne, who were captivating and thrilling on screen. Their replacements, Scott who is really quite brilliant setting the screen alight and Mulroney, who feels like he really did this film just because it was a script that fell in his direction more than anything else, just don’t have the same chemistry or intrigue as previously. Plus the horror itself, this time around the scares just felt awkwardly placed in there for the shock of making the audience jump. They didn’t really further story on, as they previously did, but rather an old ghost woman rushes in here and loud bang happens there – it feels cliched and old school, which is anything but what this horror dream team have been known for over the last few years.

As with the first two films, it does look pretty freaking awesome on screen. The colour screams out to be watched and the sets are so well thought out and immersive for the audience. But this film doesn’t quite work for fans of the franchise, this isn’t a good way to introduce people to the Insidious story but as a stand alone for those who haven’t seen the first two, it would probably work. Otherwise, it’s a bit of a let down.