Insidious: The Red Door is the fifth movie in the long-running horror franchise, but it’s the first time in a decade that we’ve revisited the central traumatized family, the Lamberts, and the red-faced demon that haunts them. The previous two movies, Insidious: Chapter 3 and Insidious: The Last Key, were prequels telling completely separate stories. After so long away from the Lamberts, revisiting them now feels a bit odd and the psychological frights are lame enough that this door should’ve stayed shut.
Patrick Wilson returns as patriarch Josh Lambert, but he also steps behind the camera and makes his directorial debut. There’s nothing particularly wrong with Wilson’s direction; it’s very safe and fitting for the movie with the least actual scares or time spent in the demonic astral plane known as The Further. So everything is very grounded in reality, as Josh and his young son Dalton (a returning Ty Simpkins), now a freshman in college, experience the reemergence of traumatic memories they were hypnotized to forget a decade earlier.
We can understand why such a drastic action was taken. When last we saw the Lamberts, Josh had been possessed by the demon and tried to murder his entire family. But the aftermath has been hard. Josh and his wife Renai (Rose Byrne, also back) are divorced; eldest son Dalton barely speaks to his father, and Josh’s mother Lorraine has recently died. The family is fractured, making them more vulnerable than ever. Josh is an absent father to all three of his kids. And Dalton, he’s an aspiring artist with a chip on his shoulder. He also can’t stop drawing creepy images of mysterious doors, shadowy figures, and other things that would cause a teacher to call security.
The Insidious movies are rooted in the idea of astral projection. Y’know, like when Doctor Strange enters a trance-like state and his consciousness leaves his body to do some other shit. That’s what Josh and Dalton can do; except they travel through The Further, which is like the Upside Down where dead spirits lurk and cause all kinds of trouble. Opening that door into The Further also leaves them free to enter our world, and that’s when things get seriously messed up.
Josh and Dalton are both experiencing the fallout of their repressed memories, and are acting out as a result. A major theme here is the legacy passed from fathers to sons, especially when it pertains to mental illness. Josh’s father could astral project, too, but people thought he was nuts. And so, Josh feels the same way and threatens to pass that along to Dalton.
This sort of archair psychiatry is moderately interesting, but not enough to carry a movie. Journeys into The Further are rare and lack thrills, which is why the film soon starts to lean on jump scares to fill the void. It’s also just a very grim, unappealing story at its core. The only hint of humor to come from it is Sinclair Daniel as Dalton’s college roommate and only friend, Chris, who is unafraid to drop some Black Girl real talk about all of this dumb supernatural stuff. If this franchise continues, pairing Chris and Dalton as a skeptic/realist duo ala Mulder & Scully could be a lot of fun.
Otherwise, Insidious: The Red Door offers closure but little else. If you’re someone who has been following the Dalton story from the beginning, it might be worth it to see the arc completed. But for the rest looking for something spooky to see this weekend, don’t bother knocking on this door.
Insidious: The Red Door is in theaters now.
