Thirteen years ago, James Wan’s Insidious hit theater screens — making them more like theater screams, am I right? That film, which told the tale of the Lambert family and their comatose son whose consciousness wandered off into a bad, bad place called “The Further,” certainly did get audiences screaming. It was a huge hit, spawning a full-throated franchise that, along with Paranormal Activity, cemented Blumhouse as the ’00s reigning studio of terror. This freaky film series comes full circle with the fifth entry, titled Insidious: The Red Door.
Lambert patriarch Patrick Wilson makes his directorial debut here, returning to the story threads that were left dangling two full franchise entries ago, at the end of 2013’s Insidious: Chapter 2. Where the third and fourth films focused on events pre-dating the family’s Further woes, The Red Door swings the Lamberts into the present, bringing back all the old familiar faces, red devil and Rose Byrne alike. Wilson does his damndest to pry a few more screams out of us. So, is The Red Door worth opening?
Kinda! It shouldn’t surprise anyone that having an actor sitting in the director’s chair this time focuses this movie more on the intricacies of character dynamics and performance than on the jump scares that Wan and screenwriter Leigh Whannell favored. All of that is actually to the movie’s ultimate benefit, but I’m not positive that horror hounds looking for huge scares will see it that way. Which is to say that Insidious: The Red Door does bring the Lamberts’ story around to a satisfying emotional close, but the frights themselves feel a little been-there, already-bought-the-T-shirt.
Where do we enter Insidious: The Red Door?
Credit: Sony Pictures
The film opens, as such stories must, in a cemetery. Nine years have passed since we last saw the Lamberts, and we find ourselves attending the funeral of grandma Lorraine (Barbara Hershey), who determinedly took her last batch of bad secrets to the grave with her. But no worries – those secrets will all claw their way out of the grave before the final reel, leaving jagged red scratches up and down everybody as they do their dirty business.
When we left the Lamberts, papa Josh (Wilson), mama Renai (Byrne), eldest and coma-prone son Dalton (Ty Simpkins), and, oh right, the other two kids were participating in a mutually agreed upon cover-up. Everybody decided that it would be best if Josh and Dalton, who shared the ability to astrally project themselves into that misty blue underworld full of souls and spooks dubbed The Further, got their memories suppressed. Put the entire nasty ordeal to bed, because that’s always the best route when it comes to horror stories. That’s not the literal definition of “a haunting” at all or anything!
Sure enough, this tactic has backfired, causing a full familial disaster. Josh and Renai have divorced as he’s methodically become a foggy shell of his former self. Awash in depersonalization and derealization, Josh is feeling a big fat heap of nothing. It’s like he’s observing his life from above, but without the fun former superpower stuff that comes along with astral projection. He’s just a ghost whose grave hasn’t been dug yet.
Dalton, about to head off to arts college, is faring a little better. Where “angsty teen” ends and “hollowed-out husk” begins can be a nebulous place, but he thankfully seems to be leaning toward the former. However, the goth-tinged nightmare art, which he compulsively draws and paints, keeps poking at wounds he doesn’t really understand. Recurring images of creepy faces and doorways keep bubbling up from somewhere. Dalton contends his portrait of his just-passed grandmother, for instance, seems full of secrets. But like his father, it all feels disassociated and vague. They’re simply unsettled and unsure of why. (Relatable, these days!)
And director Wilson, alongside screenwriter Scott Teems (Halloween Kills), does seem genuinely interested in digging around in these feelings and failings. Insidious: The Red Door, like all of the most effective hauntings, is at its best when it’s a family drama where the ghosts fill in the vacuum where the character’s shortcomings don’t reach. It even handles its metaphorical spectres of mental illness, with fears of genetically inherited disorders like schizophrenia coming into play, carefully and respectfully…while also making big red demons pop out of doorways! That’s a hell of a needle to thread, but The Red Door does as good a job as any.
But just what of all those Insidious demons and devil brides?
Credit: Sony Pictures
Once ensconced at college, Dalton’s art professor (a shamefully under-used Hiam Abbass) enthusiastically presses the artist and young man to dig deeper – to really splash his canvas with his most primordial ooze, as it were. Unfortunately for the Lamberts, and especially for Dalton’s brand new spark plug of a college roomie named Chris (Sinclair Daniel), all of that artistic unearthing cracks open the thought-better-buried past. And before you know it, there are Sixth Sense-esque ghosts puking in the bathrooms of frat parties, and an entire dance troupe of mud monsters performing a writhing Paula-Abdul-esque music video on the dorm room linoleum – a brief flash of camp that’s played far too straight for its own good.
In case it wasn’t clear there, I’ve personally always found the monsters of the Insidious universe a bit on the silly and unscary side. They’re all great Halloween costumes, for sure, but they’re art-directed to hell and back, with their Victorian doll dresses and their greasepaint ventriloquist’s-puppet eye makeup, oh my. Wilson’s team does thankfully dial down a lot of Wan’s tendencies in that department. His monsters are much grimier, and there’s a terrific set piece that takes place inside of a claustrophobic MRI tube, harkening back to the medical fears of the first film (not to mention that granddaddy of them all, The Exorcist, whose scariest scenes have always been the hospital tests).
But for the most part, the scares here are largely forgettable. There are no images that will sear themselves into the permanent horror consciousness like that one Wan concocted in the first film with the demon’s face appearing just over Wilson’s shoulder. (That iconic moment gets redrawn here alongside the director’s name during The Red Door‘s gorgeous opening credits sequence, which showcase Dalton’s artistic skills while doubling as a charcoal recap of the first two film’s events.)
The performances from the Lambert men are ultimately where it’s at.
Credit: Sony Pictures
While it’s always a pleasure to see Rose Byrne, anywhere and any time, Renai is woefully sidelined for the majority of Insidious: The Red Door. One hopes they paid her extremely well to show up and sit on a couch and watch Patrick Wilson toss and turn while wandering into the Further this one last time. However, as the franchise lays Barbara Hershey’s matron to rest with its opening frames, it would seem it symbolically has had enough of blaming the mother. Instead, this is very much a film about father and son relationships, and the bad mojo that those can pass down the line like a football.
Wilson does some of his best acting work to date here, certainly his best in this franchise. (But then he had a director who really believed in him.) The sense of grief and loss he communicates in the opening passages of the film – not so much for his mother specifically, but for his inability to feel what he wants to be feeling – is palpable. He really makes Josh’s confusion and lethargy suffusive; we feel we’re smothering too. And so when things begin to snap into place and make sense again, we’re right there with him.
The stand-out, though, is Simpkins. Returning to the role he’s spent a full half of his life to date inhabiting, Simpkins proves he’s got the talent to carry himself out of and beyond the cute kid roles he was playing in blockbuster pablum like Jurassic World. (But he also had a director who believed in him here; him and Wilson have been working together since Little Children, when Simpkins was five.) Simpkins is given the space to make Dalton a mass of contradictions – moody but decent, talented but blundering teenage-stupid – and find us a charming throughline that makes this final trip into the Further feel like one of worth.
In the end, Insidious: The Red Door closes up its own loop satisfactorily, if somewhat sappily. Lin Shaye’s medium-with-the-mostest Elise even gets to make a tastefully scarfed reappearance. But then the Wan-iverse has always been prone to a fair dose of sap. At least for all its vague afterlife jibber jabber, the Insidious movies have remained true to their atheistic origins. There’s no Christian charlatans a la The Conjuring, where those fraudsters Ed and Lorraine Warren get celebrated. (Although, weirdly enough, Wilson also appears as Ed Warren in the Conjuring/Wan-iverse flicks, including The Nun and Annabelle Comes Home.)
Insidious thankfully stays true to its mission statement, one of life and death being a marathon race of good ol’ family bullshit ripping a hole through the fabric of reality so our parent’s demons can nibble on our toes. We wouldn’t want it any other way.
