INSIDIOUS: THE RED DOOR - Mark Reviews Movies

Insidious: The Red Door, Screen Gems

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 7, 2023

A series that already ran out of ideas—if it ever really had any—with its previous installment gets another chance with Insidious: The Red Door. Bringing back the original characters and actors who started it all 12 years ago, this fifth and seemingly final entry offers an extended, unnecessary anticlimax to cap off the story of a family that simply cannot escape the fate of being trapped amidst a bunch of horror movie clichés.

Nostalgia is the order of the day here, although it takes a lot of running around and in circles on the part of screenwriter Scott Teems to even get there in the first place. We're reminded that, about a decade ago, Josh Lambert (Patrick Wilson) and his elder son Dalton (Ty Simpkins) had their memories of encountering an afterlife realm, called "the Further," suppressed by way of hypnosis.

In theory, that was the end of any recollection or connection to that haunted dimension. Then again, Josh had already undergone a similar attempt to solve the same problem as a kid, as we learned in the second movie. Unless there had been some advances in hypnosis techniques in the ensuing decades, we're now left to wonder why anyone thought a proven failure of a plan would somehow work for real this time.

It doesn't, by the way, and soon enough, both Josh, now divorced from Renai (Rose Byrne), and a college-bound Dalton start to realize that something strange had happened and, now, is happening to them. Josh has felt as if his mind is in a fog for the past nine years, and after taking his first art class with a professor (played by Hiam Abbass) whose syllabus seems to perfectly line up with a therapeutic process that gradually unlocks all of his suppressed memories, Dalton subconsciously begins drawing and painting frightening images he can't comprehend.

Most of the plot repeats these ideas over and over again, with Josh occasionally having nightmares about ghosts, before maybe seeing them while awake, and Dalton quickly realizing he's able to perform an act known as astral projection. Essentially, the teen's spirit can move through and interact with the world, unseen by mere mortals. This is, alternately, very cool and very concerning for Dalton. It all depends on the presence or absence of his new friend Chris (Sinclair Daniel), who quickly accepts—and forgets, as is required by a third act that includes her apparently not recalling how string lights work—a lot of supernatural nonsense, and how long the story has gone without a jump scare.

Obviously, anyone who has seen the previous movies, which means anyone who's bothering to watching this one, already knows all of this information and much more than our protagonists do. Teems' gamble here is to pretend that each and every revelation here is a surprise. None of them is, of course, because these movies have covered this same ground over and over again, with only enough tiny variations to justify the existence of so many sequels. As such, this entry is almost certainly the laziest of the bunch, if only because Teems doesn't even bother to come up with a justification or even an excuse for its existence.

The pace of the story feels lethargic, too, especially because we know how all of this goes. Beyond that, the script's structure is wholly routine, as our main characters wander aimlessly before having a supernatural encounter of some sort.

The movie marks Wilson's directorial debut, by the way, and it's mostly unfortunate, if only because the project is conceptually doomed on a foundational level. For his part behind the camera, Wilson does offer some tricks in terms of the silence building up to certain scares and the timing of the loudest ones. Those lengthy setups, though, feel triply hollow—because they take their time, we know what's coming, and we definitely understand more about the underlying gimmick than the movie tries to pretend we don't. Additionally, some of them are awkwardly staged, such as a scene that has Dalton hiding under a bed because he has to for the scare to happen, or paid off, such as a ghost's projectile vomit playing more like a gross-out gag than a moment of horror.

In addition to trying to pay off thematic concerns about grief and trauma that it hasn't bothered to explore in any meaningful way, the third act of Insidious: The Red Door brings back—and doesn't do much of anything with—more things we've already seen in this series. On the positive side, it's ending for the series, too. Well, that is until somebody runs out of ideas on a broader scale and decides to reboot the thing.

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