TL;DR: This is one is complicated.

Okay, that was not helpful.

Gemma is a kid who is afraid of her single mom. Gemma also handles all the housework, because the mother is unable to. One day, Gemma witnesses her mom smashing her head against the tiles in the shower to kill herself. We skip 20 years ahead. Gemma now has her own kid and for some reason, the two of them live in the same house as before. And suddenly Gemma finds herself exhibiting the same behavior her mother did, as three elderly people stalk her.

I have seen three of the however many movies there are (I guess six). I’ve seen the original, The Last Key and obviously this one. Admittedly, I keep mistaking the original with some Ethan Hawke movie I can’t remember the name of. Anyone reading this is probably tutting at their screen right here.

So, here’s what I like about this franchise: The mythology is weird and the aesthetics around it are interesting. Like in this movie, there’s a character that communicates with this world from the Further. In order to do that, they give images to a tattoo artist, who then tattoos them on a grapefruit. That’s fun. That’s learning rules on how these things work and then figuring out how to work within those rules with the tools you have. I would love to see like a prequel where they figure these kinds of things out. Although, that might also be boring, since the scientific process is essentially just elbow grease.

On the other hand, the story here is less than compelling. We are promised weird demonic beings from the Further (kind of like Limbo, I guess), but most of them are just background. Sure, we get the old people stalking our heroine both in the real world in her dreams, but those make nice and interesting scenes, not a whole.

In part, the movie relies too much on creepy atmosphere. Creepy atmosphere is good, but there’s just so much of it that you become numb to it. It does kind of pay off at the end, but it’s also too late at that point. You still need those points in the movie where we just spend time with our main characters to get acquainted with them. Now it feels like we are just supposed to know who they are. Sure, they are pretty generic, so getting to know them wouldn’t help, but maybe I wouldn’t think of them as generic, if had.

I would like to like this movie, but in the end I can’t. I like aspects of it, but overall it fails.