Back to the Further: Insidious - The Red Door (2023) - Reviewed

Images courtesy Blumhouse

 

Patrick Wilson returns to the Insidious horror franchise as both director and star with last week's underwhelming release of The Red Door, the fifth and definitely not final entry in the series. After thirteen years and several sequels, the story of the Lambert family comes to a poorly rendered close with the worst entry in the entire run and a sad first directorial outing for Wilson. 

Years after their run in with an evil presence, Daddy Lambert and his son Dalton are at odds with each other. The family is broken up after a nasty divorce, meaning Rose Byrne is only in this thing for a limited time and an absolute waste of her dramatic skillset. As Dalton heads away to college, lingering memories of the past begin to haunt him. Wilson's character heads to therapy to try and remember what happened. 

When things begin turning dark again, audiences are dragged back into "the further" where typical jump scares, terrible lighting techniques, silly make-up and an awful score try to conjure up some horrific dealings. Well, the entire thing is for naught. It's just a creatively barren movie from front to back. Nothing is scary. The writing is haphazard. And someone needs to fire the fog machine guy because he straight up sucks at his job. 

Insidious: The Red Door may have drummed up big business at this box office on its namesake, but the film is an absolute mess that has zero new to say with its convoluted plot, awful scripting, and woefully inept storytelling from Wilson and crew. Not only is the film hard to watch, it really has no plot, the scenery is bland, and there are no real scares to speak of. On top of all the negatives, this one runs an hour and forty seven minutes at a snail's pace. This summer release is a perfected lesson in repetition that counts on the other movies to inform nearly every plot point or nonsensical twist and turn. 

It's really too bad what happened with this series because it started off relatively strong despite its obvious riffs on the Poltergeist story. It's hard to imagine Wilson and Byrne wanting anything to do with Insidious at all anymore. Both actors have gone on to much greater things and better projects. Maybe the paycheck was too good to turn down, but this fifth movie was a pure letdown to someone that's enjoyed most of these as a minimalistic guilty pleasure. 

They're apparently working on a spin-off movie. It would be good if they could go ahead and cancel that. They've run out of ideas at this point and it would be good to let this thing die the death it deserves.

-CG