Insidious: The Red Door Review: A Mostly Successful Trip Back Into The Further
In 2015, someone made the boneheaded mistake of remaking "Poltergeist." It didn't go so well, even with the dependable presence of Sam Rockwell. Perhaps the film felt extra needless because five years earlier we were already given a pretty good new take on the ideas from "Poltergeist." I'm talking about "Insidious," a film that owes more than a few things to the Steven Spielberg/Tobe Hooper horror classic. Like that film, "Insidious" dealt with a suburban family falling apart as they dealt with a house of horrors. At their wit's end, the family calls in paranormal investigators to help. Sound familiar?
"Insidious" was a creepy little James Wan/Leigh Whannell fright flick that packed on suburban scares and managed to make audiences jump out of their seats. It was also a big hit, and when that happens in the horror genre, it can only mean one thing: franchise time! Sure enough, "Insidious" has spawned a slew of sequels. The latest is "Insidious: The Red Door," and while it probably won't be the final "Insidious" movie — there's still money to be made! — it is a film that attempts to close the book on the poor, haunted Lambert family. The Lamberts were the stars of "Insidious" and "Insidious: Chapter 2," and then they got to take a breather. Now we get to catch back up with them, and we see that things aren't going so great.
If you need a refresher, you're in luck — "The Red Door" liberally reuses footage from "Insidious: Chapter 2" to catch the audience back up. Most notably, the film opens by reminding us about some hypnosis. In the first two films, the Lamberts dealt with both ghosts and demons and also something called The Further, a dark and spooky otherworld where fog machines always seem to be in use. Specifically, Lambert family patriarch Josh (Patrick Wilson) and his son Dalton (Ty Simpkins) discovered they had the ability to astral project and leave their bodies. This resulted in them getting caught in The Further, because parasitic demons wanted to claim their human bodies. Josh and Dalton finally escaped, at which point father and son agreed to have their memories wiped so they never had to deal with this nonsense again. But never say never.
Now, nine years later, the Lamberts have fractured. Josh and his wife Renai (Rose Byrne, severely underused here) have divorced, and Dalton has grown up into a sulking teen about to start college. And Josh has grown estranged from his family over the years, chalking this up to a mysterious "brain fog." Father and son have no memories of ghosts or The Further, and it's pulled them apart. But that's about to change.
Building dread
Dalton goes off to college, and that's when the trouble begins. He's an art student, and one day in class, his no-nonsense teacher (Hiam Abbass) instructs the students to go "further and further" into themselves. Apparently just saying the word "further" is enough to start unlocking memories for Dalton, which begs the question: had he not heard that word in any form in nearly 10 years? No matter. What matters is Dalton rediscovers his astral projection skills — and also starts seeing some unpleasant ghosts.
Meanwhile, Josh is being tormented as well. Father and son are connected by their repressed memories, so it makes a certain amount of sense that they'd lose that repression together. And now the stage is set for more spooky shenanigans! And also a father/son reconciliation! Will the Lamberts journey back into The Further? Will the dead psychic Elise (Lin Shaye) pop up in some form to offer advice? Will there be plenty of callbacks to the previous movies? Well ... what do you think?
Wilson makes his directorial debut here, and he acquits himself nicely, especially in creating scenes that have a way of crawling under your skin. While there are jumpscares (one particularly effective jumpscare involves copious amounts of vomit) the actor/filmmaker is more interested in slowly building tension and dread, and he does so with several long, silent takes that build, and build, and build. They work exceedingly well at creating the appropriate creepy atmosphere — there's a scene with Josh inside an MRI machine that's probably one of the scariest things this series has ever done.
Thrills and chills
While the direction is as solid as (most of) the scares, the script by Scott Teems (with a story by Leigh Whannell) is occasionally flat. The college setting is almost an afterthought, although Sinclair Daniel steals several scenes as Dalton's outgoing roommate. The film can start to feel repetitive in how it unfolds — Dalton sees something scary, then we cut to Josh, and he sees something scary, then we cut back, and so on, and so forth, over and over again. It also doesn't help that this film is so indebted to "Chapter 2," one of the weakest entries in the series. Thankfully, "The Red Door" doesn't make the same mistakes as "Chapter Two," a film that took the silly route of over-explaining everything that happened in the first movie.
No over-explanation here. Indeed, some viewers might actually be surprised at how little the overall "Insidious" mythology is explored. But perhaps Wilson and company figured we already knew everything we needed to know. Perhaps they're right — it's okay to let some things remain a mystery, especially things in The Further. The unknown is always just a little bit scarier than the known. And Wilson seems more attuned to the family dynamics anyway, which isn't such a bad thing and even slightly elevates "The Red Door" above the usual thoughtless cash-grab horror sequel.
"Insidious: The Red Door" closes the book on the Lambert family and delivers more than a few thrills and chills. It doesn't reinvent the wheel, and it doesn't really add a whole lot to the series as a whole. But it'll probably give you the creeps on several occasions, and maybe that's all that really matters when you get to the fifth installment of a horror franchise. Or you can just watch "Poltergeist" again.
/Film Rating: 6 out of 10