Insidious: Out of the Further review – evil returns but so does boredom

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When the Insidious franchise started in 2010, it felt like a liberating moment for director James Wan and writer (and later director) Leigh Whannell, the Australian duo who captured the zeitgeist with the original Saw movie, which imported the gonzo energy of low-budget Ozploitation flicks. As the partners quietly ceded control to other film-makers, the Saw sequels sunk into gross, dreary exercises in mechanized murder, and they moved on to other projects. When they emerged with Insidious, another shoestring horror movie, it was a confident and wildly entertaining return to form, like a down-and-dirty fusion of 80s staples like Poltergeist and Ghostbusters.

Now the pattern has repeated itself. Though Whannell stuck around longer than Wan – Wan directed the sequel, but Whannell directed the third film and has writing or story credits through the most recent sequel, Insidious: The Red Door – the creative returns have diminished over time, even if the cheap productions are still like a license to print money. Insidious: Out of the Further arrives as the sixth entry in the series, and the fun has almost completely evaporated, replaced by a dull mythology that would be hard to piece together even if the sequels hadn’t come out in scrambled chronology.

Fortunately, the basics are simple enough: the malevolent spirits that haunt the Insidious films exist in a dark astral plane called “the Further”, a netherworld for trapped demons that buttresses our own. Though some big names like Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne have popped up in more than one entry, the one consistent presence is the delightful Lin Shaye as Elise Rainier, a psychic medium who has continued to help haunted families even after her death in the first film. Now she just pokes around the Further with her lantern, foiling demonic schemes with a gentle nature and modest one-liners like: “Hey, it’s what I do.” Whatever sliver of infectious silliness still remains in this franchise is owed entirely to her.

Written and directed by Jacob Chase, Insidious: Out of the Further mostly goes through the motions, with a couple of eerie sequences bridged by the expected metaphysical hullabaloo. An opening flashback reveals the trauma inflicted upon Gemma, a little girl whose mother’s descent into ghost-induced madness ends with her smashing her own head against the shower tile. Gemma grows to be a perky dental hygienist, played by Amelia Eve, who’s raising a girl (Island Austin) of her own in the same cursed house, believing that her mother died a neglectful drug addict. Not long after a trio of creepy old-timers start skulking around the neighborhood, history repeats itself and netherworld demons turn their attention to her.

The conceptual wrinkle in Out of the Further is that Gemma has the ability to travel into the Further and bring beings back to the real world, which is an awful special power because the undead souls can attach themselves to her like barnacles and feast on the living. With guidance from Elise and a spiritually connected tattoo artist (Maisie Richardson-Sellers), Gemma hatches a plan to keep these demons in the Further where they belong, but her talent creates the problem. The good news is that she understands her mother better. The bad news is that she and her daughter might suffer the same fate.

Where the original Insidious felt like Poltergeist and Ghostbusters with a slightly nastier edge, Out of the Further leans more on the dream logic of A Nightmare on Elm Street, where battles are waged in the abstract realms of sleep or controlled trances. To that end, Chase pulls off a white-knuckle sequence where Gemma crawls into her daughter’s couch fort and the cushions expand into thin, beige corridors, like a cross between Alice In Wonderland and the banal, featureless liminal spaces in Backrooms. Chase also takes advantage of Gemma’s dental hygienist job by giving her an appointment with a sharp-toothed minion whose rotted molars and gunk-encrusted palate are the least of her concerns.

Despite these flourishes, Chase takes all of this hokum too seriously and the film eventually dips into a harried spectacle of dodgy effects and ghost-foiling tactics that seem to be improvised on the fly. With Wan and Whannell having stepped away, save for their producer credits, Insidious seems to be barreling toward the same dead end as the Saw franchise, doomed to circle a cul-de-sac of shopworn images and story beats. At a certain point, the audience might start to feel as evidently bored as the film-makers.