Beyond a brief cameo from Lin Shaye as Elise, the soft reset for the Insidious franchise removes the Lambert family from the proceedings, taps yet another new director in Jacob Chase, and injects new lore into the astral plane “Further” world. Now, a young mother, Gemma (Amelia Eve), can bring objects — or, other more spooky things — from the Further to the real-world and vice versa. But despite all the effort to make Insidious: Out of the Further fresh — or as fresh as the sixth film in a horror franchise can be — the film still lands as an extended delirium of déjà vu. There is nothing new under the Further’s sun.
Chase’s film opens with Gemma as a little girl (played by Charli Penton), tip-toeing around on thin ice with a mercurial mother (Laura Gordon), the kind whose unpredictability and general mental unwellness causes her to wake up in the middle of the night to chase invisible demons with a butcher’s knife. As this is the opening of the sixth film in the Insidious world, the mother’s mysterious and tragic death is a foregone conclusion from the start. As an adult and mother in her own right now, Gemma still lives in the house she grew up in — a decision as unbelievable as any. After Gemma’s daughter Maya (Island Austin, the coolest-named child actor around) stumbles onto some of her grandmother’s jewelry in the garage, the cycle starts up again. Gemma unexpectedly starts to traverse the Further, a freaky world of the dead and undead, and learns from a wizened sage (Shaye, in her cameo appearance) that she is a “courier” whom dead cult leader Cyrus Lam (Sam Spruell) wants to use to bring his followers back to the material world.
The film is both written and directed by Jacob Chase, who is best known for 2020’s Come Play. Chase the writer repeats with avowed obedience the same narrative beats and horror tricks the franchise has always leaned on: parental trauma, nuclear family suburbia, problematic comings and goings with the signature astral world, and paranormal investigations — though he at least thankfully relents a little on the latter. Whether Chase was shackled by stakeholder demands or was personally on board with the story’s obsequiousness to brand identity is ultimately irrelevant because the writing in Out of the Further does little to distinguish the film from the franchise’s previous entries, beyond the minor wrinkle of new courier world-building. The sum remainder of thematic interest and narrative shape reflect only bland regurgitation in the series’ soft reboot.
Chase the director, on the other hand, shows he has the chops to make a good horror film. It’s just not this one. In another life, he designed, built, and ran a yearly haunted house in Los Angeles, and he brings that expertise to several inspired sequences. The best two scenes come near the film’s middle and are situated roughly back-to-back. Gemma is a dental hygienist, and Cyrus sends one of his elderly (living) lackeys for a cleaning. Chase and cinematographer Dave Garbett nail the difficult task of balancing tonal shifts in this sequence, from the pure grotesquerie of dental hygiene and gunk scraping to outright gerontophobia horror. The shots from inside the mouth of the old man, confining the vantage point to a fixed eye looking out from the back of his throat, are genuinely well-directed and offer not just a high point in this film, but some of the best work the largely substandard franchise has yet offered.
Chase follows the teeth-horror with a second, equally dynamic scene. Gemma arrives home from work, dozes off on the couch, and “wakes up” to strange happenings in her daughter’s pillow fort in the living room. She crawls into the pitch-black opening and finds herself in a claustrophobic Cretan-style labyrinth with sinisterly smiling old people cornering her in dead ends. Chase is fully in his directorial wheelhouse at this point, temporarily transforming his film into an actual haunted house of sorts. The play between the pillow fort’s various routes, opening up like hallways in a Halloween haunt, and negative space that will only stay negative for so long produces jump scares so effective they are almost cathartic. Gemma pries herself between the couches, and the camera follows, but instead of a magic opening that frees her from the chase and ushers her back to material reality, the world becomes even narrower and compressed. Her cheeks hardly hold open the gap, and the pillows squeeze her like the compactor in Star Wars.
Unfortunately, Out of the Further never comes close to these highs again. The film’s concern with multi-generational trauma slithers to the center of the drama again, and the characters connect certain dots way too late. Cyrus, for his part, looks like a cheap, undead Criss Angel, and his cultic backstory is more interesting as a hypothetical premise of its own than something that actually works within the context of this specific story. Any themes of religion or the fanatical that this backstory might raise are surely incidental, and every second spent with Elise functioning as the Further’s psychopomp kills any narrative momentum for the sake of fan service. The more Insidious: Out of the Further comes to be about its characters, the more lifeless the whole thing is. And then, the rotten cherry on top, viewers are given a superhero-fied ending, wherein Doctor Gemma Strange transports an entire house filled with Cyrus’ undead cult back to the Further. It’s compelling in much the manner of a trainwreck: leaving you aghast but unable to peel your eyes away. If the rest of the film doesn’t descend quite to these depths of atrociousness, that’s not saying much.
DIRECTOR: Jacob Chase; CAST: Amelia Eve, Brandon Perea, Lin Shaye, Sam Spruell, Joseph Lopez; DISTRIBUTOR: Sony Pictures Releasing; IN THEATERS: August 21; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 46 min.
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