New Entry in Tired Horror Franchise

The good news about Insidious: Out of the Further, the sixth entry in the hit horror film franchise created by Leigh Whannell and James Wan, is that it deals with a new set of victims. After all, we can all agree that the poor Lambert family has been through enough in the previous installments.

The bad news about the new Insidious movie is that, well, it’s still an Insidious movie. Which means that we have to sit through the spectacle of some unlucky individuals dealing with the Further, that purgatorial netherworld inhabited by demons and the dead that forms the basic mythology of the series.

It’s never a good sign when a horror film stops dead in its tracks to explain things to a main character and, by extension, the audience. But that’s exactly what happens here when the central character Gemma (Amelia Eve, The Haunting of Bly Manor), a single mother with a young daughter, visits Clare (Maisie Richardson-Sellers), a tattoo artist and part-time medium. Clare conjures up the spirit of now-deceased recurring character Elise Rainier (series mainstay Lin Shaye) to explain exactly what the hell is going on with Clare’s mysterious encounters with three ghostly-looking alta kockers who show up at the most inopportune times. By the time the lengthy scene is over, you’ll wish you had been taking notes.

It turns out that Gemma, whose mother died under horrific circumstances when she was a little girl (an incident harrowingly depicted in the opening sequence), is not only someone who has the ability to enter the Further, which is bad enough, but also a “Courier,” meaning that she can transport things from there to the physical world. It’s a rare talent that greatly interests Cyrus (Sam Spruell), a cult-leader entity who very much wants to escape his confines. To that end, he enlists the services of the aforementioned elderly trio, his Acolytes, to move in next door to Gemma and move things along.   

Director-screenwriter Jacob Chase, who has experience with this sort of material thanks to his 2020 horror film Come Play, establishes tension in the opening moments and steadily ratchets it up from there. He certainly knows his way around jump scares, both of the cheap variety (cue the sudden loud noises!) and the more thoughtful kind. His skills are evident in the film’s two most effective sequences — the first involving Gemma venturing into a pillow fort constructed by her daughter Maya (Island Austin, very convincing at looking utterly terrified) that turns into an endless labyrinth featuring demons at every corner.

In the second, Gemma, a dentist by trade, attends to an elderly patient, one of the Acolytes, who clearly has not been paying attention to oral hygiene. The ensuing encounter, probably the most gruesome cinematic dental scene since Marathon Man, will scare you into scheduling a deep cleaning post-haste.  

Otherwise, Insidious: Out of the Further proves routine in its elaborate plot machinations that remind you how tiresome a place the Further can be. There are plenty of Easter egg references to the previous films, including the reappearance of numerous demonic entities and the Red Door that serves as an entranceway to the Further’s various portals.

The most notable carryover, of course, is Shaye’s now iconic character of psychic paranormal investigator Elise, who didn’t let her death in the original 2011 film deter her from appearing in all the follow-ups. She pops up here again to guide Gemma through her travails, carrying a lantern like an otherworld Diogenes and clearly taking no crap from a spectral punk like Cyrus. When Gemma thanks her after being rescued at one point, Elise casually responds, “It’s what I do.”

After a while the film’s sustained creepiness gives way to self-parody, with all the grotesquely made-up performers portraying the demonic figures starting to look like exhausted Comic-Con attendees after a very long weekend. It all mainly serves to indicate that this is a series that has long reached the point of steadily diminishing returns.