INSIDIOUS: OUT OF THE FURTHER Review: Non-Essential Entry Over-Promises and Under-Delivers

After an all-too-brief, three-year hiatus, the highly profitable Insidious series returns with its sixth, far-from-final entry, Insidious: Out of the Further.

 

Co-created by James Wan and Leigh Whannell as a counter to the graphic, ultra-violent blood-and-gore Saw series they originated in 2004, Insidious and its follow-ups featured a more traditional, supernatural set-up. Instead of the usual supernatural entry, however, Insidious kept the haunts, but instead of ghosts or demons haunting a specific location (i.e., a house), they haunted the human characters themselves.

 

The premise alone contributed a generally suffocating sense of claustrophobia: Fleeing a haunted house, the standard go-to escape for supernatural stories, didn’t matter anymore. The unhappy, restless ghosts and/or the parasitic demons had to be met and defeated in what Whannell called the “Further,” a purgatorial realm where said ghosts and demons lingered, ever eager to return to the world of the living by any means necessary. 

 

Famous, in part, for the so-called ‘Lipstick Demon,” Insidious racked up its share of gore-free, family-friendly scares alongside propulsively economical storytelling. Made for a budget-squeezing $3M, Insidious became a box-office hit in 2010, spawning five sequels, each one of varying quality, each one delivering fewer surprises and, more importantly, for horror fans, fewer overall scares. 

 

Shifting focus from the family at the center of the original Insidious to an entirely new one (a plus, by any definition), Insidious: Out of the Further extends the relatively simple, straightforward lore involving the Further, astral projection, and parasitic demons, and adds a new one: so-called Travellers, who can move between realms, usually via a planned trance or simply falling asleep, can also now bring objects back from the Further, including the ghosts and demons who desperately want back into our world. 

 

They’re called Couriers (of course) and not only can they bring objects from the Further, but they can bring them back. It’s a handy wrinkle or twist on an already somewhat over-familiar plot. It’s also one writer-director Jacob Chase (Come Play) exploits for all the newfound gimmick’s worth, turning the Traveller-Courier at the center of the new entry, Gemma (Amelia Eve, The Haunting of Bly Manor), a dental hygienist by day and supernatural conduit by night, into a mostly worthy protagonist.

 

Leaning heavily — far too heavily for some, including this writer — into the usual “T” is “trauma” backstory, Chase gives Gemma, single mother to Maya (Island Austin), and like Maya, the daughter of a single mother, Ingrid (Laura Gordon), a deeply tragic history involving mental illness, abandonment, and suicide. It’s more than enough — or should be more than enough — to send any adult survivor of childhood trauma into years of therapy, all of it deserved and/or earned by encountering so much pain, anguish, and tragedy at such an early age. 

 

One day after returning home from elementary school, Gemma (Charli Penton) encounters Ingrid, slumped over or passed out on the dinner table. Underlit interiors can’t hide the unwashed dishes in the sink, a table piled high with papers, or Gemma quietly making herself dinner before moving to her upstairs bedroom to complete that day’s homework. Ingrid’s sudden appearance startles and upsets Gemma, but it soon becomes clear Gemma’s experienced exactly this kind of interaction with her mother before. Except it goes from bad to worse to life-altering within seconds.

 

In the present, Gemma has stubbornly decided to remain in her childhood home. Her longtime boyfriend and the town’s only cop, Nick (Brandon Perea, Nope), gently suggests selling a house full of unhappy memories and moving elsewhere, but Gemma just can’t let go. An unintentional hoarder, she’s filled the garage with her mother’s possessions and can’t convince herself to donate or sell any of them. She’s locked into the past, in part because she can’t — or won’t try to find — an explanation for her mother’s neglect or her premature death. 

 

While she has Maya, Nick, and a steady gig, all pluses, everything starts to change for the worse when she keeps seeing three new neighbors, oldsters bordering on leaving this mortal plane for the next, wandering in her neighborhood. Their rictus smiles and thousand-yard stares portend the sign of bad things to come, including frequent, unwanted trips to the Further, encounters with a greasy-haired, unhygienic, Further-dwelling cult leader, Cyrus (Sam Spruell), eager to use Gemma’s paranormal talents for nefarious ends, and at least one visit to the dentist’s office that no one in their right mind would want to experience on a personal level.

 

Chase’s screenplay mines two interlocking phobias: fear of old people (death, dying, and the rest) and dentistry (teeth drilling, rotted molars, and so forth) to impressively repulsive effect. The film’s best set piece, though, doesn’t involve the cult trio, a visit to the dentist’s chair, or even the Further itself (a basic idea exhausted by its overuse), but on Gemma losing herself in a never-ending, always expanding pillow fort. Every right turn is a wrong turn, every wrong turn gets her closer to the parasitic demon or his dentally challenged minions. 

 

It’s liminal horror done right. Unfortunately, nothing that follows tops the pillow fort scene, dashing whatever unrealistic expectations that scene created in the audience. Chase hits the by-now standard beats for an Insidious entry: To escape Cyrus’s clutches and/or plans, she has to enter the Further and lead him to another “Red Door” (where imaginable pain awaits) with the help of series mainstay Elise Rainier (Lin Shaye), now an interdimensional ghostly go-between.

 

Insidious: Out of the Further runs out of ideas well before Gemma enters the Further one last time, limping along to a preordained conclusion. By then, patience with the series will surely wear thin, raising a relevant question: If this is the best the Insidious team can do in the three years between entries, why not stop now, take a break, and regroup instead of greenlighting another sequel? The obvious answer, potential box-office returns for a seventh entry, shouldn't be acceptable anymore.