Much like the sight of a scarlet stained demon peeking over your shoulder, I don’t think anyone was expecting another Insidious movie to suddenly pop up out of the ether to try to scare us once again.
However, with this fifth installment, we find franchise centre point and James Wan regular, Patrick Wilson, literally calling the shots as he possesses the directors chair like a denizen of the Further comandeers a human body. But he might have something of a sizable task ahead of him as the Insidious franchise has not only been dormant since The Last Key back in 2018, but the series hasn’t even focused on the beleaguered Lambert family since 2013, opting instead to prequelize itself with the comings and goings of Lin Shaye’s gutsy psychic.
Can this new, but rather belated installment, renew interest in a series that’s since been overshadowed by the sprawling Conjuring universe or will all this business of ghost dimensions, family strife and memory suppression fade away into the dark, never to be heard of again?
As we catch up with the Lambert family once more, we find that things are markedly different from the unit we once knew. While all the supernatural shenanigans that once befell father Josh and eldest son Dalton have been successfully repressed due to hypnosis, the effects of removing chunks of their memory that involves their talent for astral projection have taken their toll. For a start, lingering memories of her husband’s murderous possession have caused Renai to divorce him and the effects of the mind wipe has left Josh foggy and unreliable, especially in the wake of the recent passing of his mother. However, the most damaging aspect is that a sizable wedge has been placed between a grown Dalton and his dad, but is something Josh hopes to fix by offering to drive his son to art college.
However, while this fails to work, matters are made even worse when Dalton’s unorthodox teacher suggests he dig deep within himself to draw inspiration from suppressed emotion and in doing so, manages to accidently rediscover the Further and his talent for slipping into a dimension full of violent demons and spirits who don’t react well to living beings wandering through their domain. But while Dalton explores his strange new/old ability, it also causes the mental blocks placed of Josh to weaken too, causing him to have violent visions of a spirit that’s seemingly trying to tell him something.
Worst of all, all this toying in dark domains stirs up the Lipstick Face Demon, a beast who has an intimate relationship with Dalton and who was the cause of his coma all those years ago.
The first thing to realise when deciding to open The Red Door is that Wilson and company haven’t particularly designed the movie for newbies in mind, so unless you’ve recently restored your memories with the first two films, there’s a very good chance you’ll find yourself much like Dalton once he rediscovers the Further – aimlessly drifting in an unknowable landscape until something nasty scuttles along to put the shits up you. The basics are covered, sure; with the basic concepts filled in neatly as both Josh and his son eventually gain total recall, but if you haven’t familiarized yourself with Indidious Chapter 2 within the last week or so, some of the more complicated details and a lot of the small nods to previous movies will tend to fly right over your head and not have a fraction of the impact that the filmmakers obviously think they will.
Aside from that, Insidious: The Red Door is nothing more than an efficient little scarer which seems to owe its entire existence because star Wilson and producers James Wan, Leigh Whannell and Jason Blum wanted to give the Lamberts an appropriate send off. While this isn’t exactly a bad thing (Indiana Jones has had three send offs in over thirty years), it does kind of take matters slightly into the realms of a legacy sequel which always work best the more clued up you are on the series in question. Still, Insidious devotees will no doubt be enthralled at seeing how the years have treated the most spectrally abused family since the Freelings from the Poltergeist movies and keying into the theme of the times, the family dynamic that got them through their ordeals hasn’t been enough to keep them together. Josh’s hypnotism caused funk has caused him to drift from his family and his wife (Rose Byrne returning in an extended cameo) has since divorced him, unable to reconcile the experiences of nearly being beaten to death with a hammer by a possesed spouse with a man you can no longer remember them. It makes sense to rediscover the family in such disarray and it provides plenty of situations for Wilson to employ his patented “troubled” face, but in an attempt to make this a father-and-sons plot, the rest of the family seem weirdly like supporting characters.
The bulk of the movie is chiefly made up of us marveling at how much Ty Simpkins has grown since the days of Iron Man 3, Jurassic World and Insidious as his art classes gradually edge him into disaster as his kooky roommate looks on in horror. However, in an attempt to prevent this entry from becoming Insidious Goes To College we also have Josh receiving an equal amount of inconvenient scares while trying to unravel both his memory and the mystery of bos absent father. The result creates something of a schism with the Dalton scenes covering old ground and the Josh scenes suffering by feeling a little undercooked. Adding to this is the fact that while Sinclair Daniel’s Chris – Dalton’s over exuberant college buddy – provides much of the same comic relief as Specs and Tucker did (who also cameo), she really does feel like the sort of stock character Blumhouse sticks in a lot of their films to mix things up.
However, while Wilson seems content to mimic James Wan’s style and not display any noticable directorial voice of his own, he does supply a nice line of creeping, Insidious-type scares that range from an unpleasant encounter inside a MRI machine to a Sam Raimi-esque face to face with a vomiting spirit.
It works, maybe not as spectacularly as the first Insidious movie, but well enough to give you a creepy enough goodbye to a franchise I thought had all but shut up shop anyway.
If you have trouble telling your Brides In Black from your Keyfaces, you’re probably going to find this fifth dive into the Further a mite confusing, but even though the Red Door is apparently closed for the foreseeable future, don’t be alarmed if something else sneaks through the back door if the box office raises things from the dead.
🌟🌟🌟
We Have Issues 