'Insidious: Out of the Further' review: Long tenured franchise still has a few scares left in the tank
- Nate Adams
- 8 minutes ago
- 4 min read
Courtesy of Sony
Halfway through “Insidious: Out of the Further,” the sixth installment in a franchise that swore 2023’s subtitled “The Red Door” was, indeed, the last one, a character says, “When one door closes, another one always opens.” It plays almost like the movie giving itself an excuse for why, until the end of time, the studio can keep cranking these suckers out as long as people keep showing up to buy a ticket.
It’s a little silly, especially because outside of the first one, there hasn’t really been an exceptional “Insidious” movie, or even one I’ve felt compelled to revisit. At a certain point, they all start blending together into one big foggy trip through the Further. In the case of “Out of the Further,” however, there’s at least a little more to latch onto. Directed with a steady hand by “Come Play” helmer Jacob Chase, it has a few solid jump scares up its sleeve while stripping the series back to its most effective foundation: a mother trying to protect her child while discovering that the demons we try to bury have a nasty habit of clawing their way back out. On some level, there’s a truth to that, and Chase wisely uses it to give all the supernatural mumbo jumbo something recognizably human underneath.
Does that warrant a sixth (!) installment? That’s ultimately up to audiences to decide, but considering how cheaply these movies can be made and how reliably people show up for them, you can probably expect another one every other year until the Further finally runs out of real estate. Still, it could be worse. “Out of the Further” is considerably more grounded and spooky than the Patrick Wilson-directed installment from 2023, and it accomplishes that without leaning heavily on the Lambert family or treating the legacy cast as a crutch. These are mostly new faces dealing with the same old nightmare, which proves that with the right creative team steering the ship, there’s still some mileage left in a vehicle that arrived with such a distinctive identity back in 2010, when James Wan and co-creator Leigh Whannell found a way to turn red-faced demons, astral projection and Tiny Tim into mainstream horror iconography.
Like their other franchise, “Saw,” Whannell and Wan have largely moved on from “Insidious” despite each remaining involved in various capacities over the years, leaving the studio to keep digging through the Further for whatever story thread it can unearth next. The saving grace is that the premise is flexible enough to withstand that kind of corporate mining. The formula rarely changes, and the people buying tickets know exactly what they’re signing up for. There’s money in familiarity, after all, and while the franchise has helped turn Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne into familiar horror faces, its enduring personality still owes an enormous debt to Lin Shaye’s psychic medium Elise Rainier. Ever since her death, she’s basically been wandering around the Further helping families deal with their own demons, and Shaye continues to bring an inherent warmth and slight goofiness to a series that can otherwise become oppressively self-serious. She remains its brightest light and, at this point, one of the few genuine connective tissues worth coming back for.
Chase, thankfully, also has an eye for staging claustrophobic and downright eerie sequences without simply throwing another demon into a dark corner and waiting for the music to blast. It helps that our main character, Gemma (Amelia Eve), a single mother raising her daughter (Island Austin), is a dental hygienist, giving Chase plenty of opportunities for creepy interior shots of mouths accompanied by top-notch Foley work that genuinely gave me the heebie-jeebies. Horror has always understood that there are few things more uncomfortable than being trapped in a chair while somebody pokes around inside your mouth, and “Out of the Further” gets some surprisingly effective mileage out of that vulnerability.
Naturally, Gemma also comes equipped with a traumatic childhood. She watched her mother commit suicide in front of her as a child and, inexplicably, still lives in the same cursed house where it happened. As if that weren’t enough of a red flag, a trio of slimy elderly folks has conveniently moved in next door and are, naturally, up to no good conjuring bad actors from the Further. The screenplay isn’t exactly subtle about stacking the deck against Gemma, but Amelia Eve gives the character enough bruised vulnerability to keep the supernatural chaos tethered to something emotional. Her fear isn’t simply that something evil is coming for her daughter, but that the trauma she has spent her entire life containing might somehow be inherited by her.
Gemma is a particularly enticing target because she is, I hesitate to say blessed, but it’s probably the most apt word, with the ability to travel into the Further and bring people back into the real world in a very “A Nightmare on Elm Street”-coded fashion. Unfortunately, that makes the doorway swing both ways. Undead souls can latch onto her and hitch a ride back into reality, creating a vicious cycle in which the boundary between confronting trauma and unleashing it becomes increasingly thin. It’s not exactly groundbreaking horror psychology, but it gives Chase a sturdy enough framework for a handful of ghoulish PG-13 encounters that should satisfy the tween audience that has devoured these movies for more than a decade.
One sequence involving a blanket fort from hell is a particularly crafty standout, emblematic of the ways “Insidious” can still occasionally find new corners of familiar spaces to make frightening. That has always been the franchise’s greatest trick. The mythology may have grown increasingly convoluted, but the scares work best when they invade something ordinary: a bedroom, a hallway, a family home, or in this case, the supposedly safe childhood sanctuary of a blanket fort.
Does any of it really matter in the grand scheme of a franchise where death has never stopped anybody from appearing in another sequel? Probably not. The Further is a conveniently endless landscape, capable of producing new demons, new families and new excuses to open another door whenever the box office demands it. “Insidious: Out of the Further” doesn’t make a particularly convincing argument that we needed to walk through that door again, but it does make the journey considerably more worthwhile than expected. Six movies in, that might be about as close to a victory as “Insidious” can reasonably hope for.
Grade: C+
INSIDIOUS: OUT OF THE FURTHER is now playing in theaters.
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