Movie Review: Insidious - The Red Door

 

Like the narrative behind it, Insidious is a film series which refuses to stay dead. The first film in the franchise clearly delivered on a winning formula of supernatural horror with trademark jump scares offset with a slight sense of comedy. It wasn't a ground breaking horror film by any means, but it clearly did enough to attract enough of a audience to justify Blumhouse Productions releasing five films in the franchise to this point. Despite it's long life span though, I struggle to see much value in these films past the first entry in all honesty. The latest entry titled Insidious: The Red Door stands as the purest example of the stagnation that has kept this series anchored to 2010 era of horror. 

Directed by Patrick Wilson in his directorial debut, Insidious: The Red Door is the 5th entry in the Insidious franchise and serves as a direct sequel to the events of Insidious 1 and 2. Featuring a lot of the original cast from those two films, The Red Door aims to revisit the core narrative that cumulated with the Lambert family surviving their turmoil with the Further. Its cast includes a lot of returning names including Ty Simpkins, Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne and Andrew Astor who reinhabit the roles they left behind over 10 years ago. 

The narrative of Insidious The Red Door follows the Lambert family nine years after the concluding events of Insidious 2.  Dalton Lambert is now a young adult heading to college and is trying hard to deal with a struggling relationship with his father Josh. As both father and son try to find some sense of common ground, both are plagued by visions of the Further which they thought were long gone. As Dalton tries to lose himself in his art studies the visions of the Further only grow more intense and before too long the Lambert family are faced with an all too familiar peril which they must defeat once more. 

There is very little weight or life behind this film. When I say it rehashes a lot of the core narrative from the first two entries, I really mean that it rehashes a lot of it.  It feels like this movie lacks any desire to do anything new or interesting with these characters. it brings back this family unit only to split them off for a majority of the film too. I get the desire to put more of a focus on Dalton, but his character is so devoid of actual character that you may as well replace him with a blank piece of paper. Why waste such a solid concept of reuniting the audience with this family and fail to do anything viable with them? All this film succeeds in doing is retreading plot points we've already seen. Hell Insidious 3 and 4 may be bad but at least they were attempting to do something different while trying to stick to the core formula of this series; The Red Door just feels so devoid of any justification to exist on a narrative level. 

Even on a production level, this film feels inherently lazy. I don't take issue with the direction because I can at least feel Wilson is trying to do something credible with the way he shoots scenes, but the scope of it all is so weak. Jump scares come and go in a flash with little to no variation on the horror element besides it.  The production and scale of this film is so shallow that it really surprised me that it had a 16 million dollar budget behind it! Even the acting feels so phoned in in this movie. I had hoped with the cast returning to play these familiar characters, there'd be some sense of energy to their performance but everyone just feels there for the paycheck and not much else. 

I think the horror film genre is capable of telling so many different kind of stories. Filled with interest and captivating fright. Insidious: The Red Door is not one of those films. It's a film which just exists to reclaim revenue from a franchise long dormant and one for which I feel should have remained that way.  I can only hope this is the last time we see this franchise come back to life, but with a $113 million box office gross, that hope is more than likely false.