Insidious: The Red Door is the 5th installment of the Insidious franchise but the f1st with the Lambert family since Insidious 2. This movie claims to be the final chapter in their story, but it’s just a rehash of things we’ve seen before.
It’s been 9 years since Insidious 2, and both Josh (Patrick Wilson) and his son Duncan (Ty Simpkins) had hypnosis to remove all memory of their time in the Further. Since then, Josh has gotten divorced and grown apart from his family. After Duncan heads off to college, both father and son find they are haunted by the past and must reclaim their memories to fight the evil that still stalks them.
Patrick Wilson both stars and directs this installment of the franchise, but there’s not a whole lot to work with here. The story is tired and old, failing to introduce any new excitement to a story that felt like it had already ended. While the first two film introduced us to the Further and astral projection, this movie does little more than retread the same ground. The plot does dig a little deeper into Josh’s past but that feels unnecessary and just padding to the story. I suppose it is an attempt to bring everything full circle, but frankly, after Insidious 2, there wasn’t any desire to learn more about the story. And the pacing is horrible. The entire middle portion of the film slows to a crawl with way too much exposition. You wonder if anything of interest is going to happen and when it does, it’s all quite predictable and severely underwhelming.
The cast is okay, I suppose. There’s not a whole lot to these characters though. The whole film relies on the strained relationship between father and son. While both Wilson and Simpkins are fine, they fail to capture any real emotion. They’re just the absent father and moody son archetypes. But nothing brings people together like spending time together in a demon netherworld (I was rooting for the demons though).
While Rose Byrne does return as Renai, she is sorely underused (it's little more than a cameo). Sinclair Daniel as Duncan’s new friend may give the most interesting performance, but she’s just a plot device to provide help when needed. There isn’t an investment in anyone’s fate.
For a horror movie, much of the above can be forgiven if the movie delivers enough scares. But The Red Door has frightfully little of that. A couple times the movie does start to approach an eerie atmosphere, but it is never able to commit to it. There’s never any real dread, and every time the movie approaches something close to it, it backs off. Instead, it relies on a series of jump scares, most of which are badly executed. You may jump once or twice, but the jump scares are so completely overused that they lose all effectiveness.
If you want to talk horror though, let’s discuss the visual effects. There are many practical effects used in the movie, and for the most part that all looks good. But there must not have been much left over for the CGI budget. The CGI effects look cheap. At least when you can see them. There is a lot of time in this movie spent in dark spaces, and some scenes simply become too dark to fully appreciate what’s happening. It all feels second rate.
Insidious: The Red Door fails to live up to the first two installments of this story, although mainly on par with the rest of the franchise. There are a couple good moments, but it’s a story that didn’t need to be told, and ultimately feels like one last cash grab for a franchise well past its prime. One of the taglines used for this movie was “It ends where it all began”. Great, just so long as it ends. This movie is only for big fans of the franchise who want one more story. Everyone else should probably skip it.
Have you seen Insidious: The Red Door? Are you planning to? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.