The Insidious franchise has now been running for nearly twenty years. When the first film premiered, it was a pretty transparent low-budget riff on Poltergeist from Leigh Whannell and James Wan. The writer and director had hit horror genre gold half a decade earlier with their low-budget horror-thriller Saw, but had hit a rough spot with subsequent efforts, like Dead Silence, falling flat. As such, Insidious was pitched as a return to basics that pivoted away from the overt gore of their prior efforts and instead embraced classical suspense elements. The film even received a PG-13 rating, a far cry from the torture porn subgenre they had helped to popularize with their prior works.
That first Insidious ultimately proved to be so well-received that it not only effectively relaunched the careers of Whannell and Wan (both of whom are now acclaimed genre filmmakers in their own rights) but also, in tandem with Wan’s later The Conjuring, launched a whole new era of supernatural horror films. While this wider popularity and success has helped the franchise endure over the years, it has also come with its own unique baggage, and nowhere is that more apparent than in the latest film, Insidious: Out of the Further.
Directed by Jacob Chase, I was honestly fairly impressed with the opening sequence of this new Insidious sequel. It’s a 1999-set, relatively quiet little cold open full of dread and tension, but one that Chase and his team do a lot to accentuate. The visual language is immediately more accomplished and high-grade than I was expecting (credit to DP Dave Garbett), and the editing (by Gregory Plotkin) is deliberately carving out space for smaller character beats to really shine through and accentuate the horrors. When it cuts to twenty years later (the bulk of the film takes place in 2019, for reasons that aren’t really worth worrying about), things continue at a pretty solid pace; lead performers Amelia Eve and Brandon Perea are both compelling and endearing, there are some inventive moments of visual staging for scares, and there’s even some surprisingly effective subtle thematic flourishes.
However, it sadly doesn’t take long for the care and consideration of these early moments to fade away. Before long, the scripting (also by Jacob Chase) gets bogged down in a bunch of heavy exposition and tangentially related lore that pulls focus from the actual story at hand and incorporates a bunch of bewildering elements. It’s clearly an effort to shake up the established formula of these films and do something less than formulaic, but it loses the simplicity, clarity, and effectiveness of that original Insidious in the process.
I didn’t refer to that first film as a low-budget Poltergeist riff as something derogatory, but rather as complementary. The story is straight-forward, the characters’ motivations are clear, and there are enough unknown elements surrounding the Further, this nebulous realm can remain shrouded in darkness and mystery. In Out of the Further, though, Chase seems bewilderingly intent on litigating every last iota of inner workings of the Further, to the detriment of his own film. The movie manages to explain way too much about the ways in which all of this works but fails to actually provide satisfactory answers to the biggest questions.
So, the crux of this story revolves around an undead cult leader who is attempting to escape the Further and return to the real world. He has magical powers (for some reason) and was set free after the Lambert family permanently closed their ‘red door’ to the Further in the previous film… I guess? There’s a literal line of dialogue midway through the film where a character says, “When one door opens, another closes… but what’s behind this door is terrible,” which you could honestly slap up on the poster.
On top of this, there are ‘travelers,’ who are people who can go into the Further while still alive, as well as ‘couriers,’ who are travelers that can bring back things or people from the Further into the real world. This results in a whole lot of hand-waving as the villain’s main goal is to return to the world of the living, but the film fails to ever give him a worthwhile reason for that. A character half-jokes at one point that he wants ghosts and demons to take over the world, and I guess that’s just kind of what we’re left with, but that’s extremely underwhelming as the meaning behind this whole story.
The whole thing feels like Out of the Further is simultaneously attempting to be A Nightmare on Elm Street sequel and a Stranger Things episode, just without any of the flair or fun of those. Suddenly, every other character seems to have magical powers of some kind that never work quite right when the movie most demands it. There’s a sequence involving grapefruits just before the second act that plays exactly like one of the terrible ‘here’s the plan’ moments from the final season of Stranger Things, actually: a visual representation of the group’s plan that is just bafflingly laid out at every turn. The entire final act of this film is egregiously dragged out, full of the limpest repeated scares, and just feels like a two-ton bulk of ‘lore’ breaking the back of this film.
Thematically, the film is attempting to speak to intergenerational trauma in matriarchal relationships, and it just doesn’t feel like this Insidious sequel is up to that pretty gargantuan task. Again, there are some subtler beats early on that I felt worked in this regard, but by the time things really get going and there are multiple characters using their magical powers to force-push people around rooms, it feels like all of the subtlety has been bled out of this thing.
GRADE: C-
Overall, Insidious: Out of the Further is completely fine for a sixth installment in a decades-running horror franchise. It brings in some fresh talent and new ideas but ultimately can’t quite square those ambitions with the franchise itself. No matter how much you upscale the budget or aspire to bring in more magical elements, this is still a series tied to the original’s aesthetic choices; Out of the Further is still visually defined by cheap fog machines and a goofy color grade. The opening act of this thing is pretty solid and demonstrates that Chase and co. have some real talent, but it all just devolves into nonsense by the second act and is outright grating by the third.
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