Red Means Stop
The ‘Insidious’ franchise gets its fifth entry and why the hell are we still doing with this?
Insidious: The Red Door
Director: Patrick Wilson • Writer: Scott Teems
Starring: Ty Simpkins. Patrick Wilson, Hiam Abbass, Sinclair Daniel, Andrew Astor, Rose Byrne
USA • 1hr 47mins
Opens Hong Kong July 13 • IIB
Grade: C
Patrick Wilson had his work cut out for him. Yes, he’s the star of an occasionally underrated horror franchise, that being Insidious, which has proven to be pretty creepy, if consistently overshadowed by another horror franchise that came out around the same time: The Conjuring from 2013. Ironically, Wilson starred in that as well, just three years after Insidious. It’s made him something of a genre legend. Add to that, his “mentors” on those films are bone fide horror legends James Wan and Leigh Whannell. So you’d think that Wilson would at least be able to conjure (see what I did there?) up some jump scares for his directorial debut in the… checks notes… fifth Insidious film but no. No, he can’t. Not that Scott Teems – who wrote the dreadful Halloween Kills and the execrable Firestarter remake no one asked for – gave him much to work with. I swear to god if I see one more horror film tackling generational trauma and the legacy of mental illness I’m going to put a hole in the next movie screen it dares play on.
Dalton’s a dick
And that’s the issue with Insidious: The Red Door. Yes, it’s a little on the dull side, and it’s loaded to the gills with familiar Insidious imagery (more hallway lanterns!), but more than anything it treads such (rapidly) familiar ground it’s really difficult to care about the Lambert family and its multi-generational astral projecting or whatever it is. Seriously, these people just can’t stop discovering their special powers to commune with the dead. And The Red Door goes one further by basically recapping a lot of what we already know.
The Red Door starts mostly after Insidious: Chapter 2, with the haunted Dalton Lambert (Ty Simpkins, The Whale) fighting with his father, Josh (Wilson) and heading off to art school. Then he starts with the visions and afterlife and yadda yadda, and his roommate Chris (Sinclair Daniel) proves he’s not crazy, helping him discover the coma he said he was in at 10 was really a trip to “The Further”. Meantime, Josh is looking into his father’s past, trying to figure out why he abandoned him as a kid, effectively laying the groundwork for Josh himself to become a shitty dad.
Horror buffs are going to be all over this, mostly because that’s the way horror buffs roll (no shade, just recognition of the patience demanded to find horror gems). And like I said, over the years Insidious has delivered its share of well-earned frights and spookiness. But Dalton increasingly comes off more whiny brat than PTSD sufferer, and when the big family mystery about Josh’s possession and the reason for his divorce from Renai (Rose Byrne) is uncovered, it’s more “Yeah, we know!” than “OMG!” It’s in the first damn film.
As a filmmaker Wilson is competent if not revelatory, and he does demonstrate an eye for composition despite the hoary material, but there’s just not that much to say about The Red Door that will dissuade devotees or win over newbies. We’ve seen Hereditary. We’ve seen Relic. We’ve seen The Babadook. We don’t need to see them again. It might be time to put this franchise out to pasture. — DEK