Insidious: Out of the Further: Movie Review

Cast: Lin Shaye, Sam Spruell, Amelia Eve
Director: Jacon Chase

The horror franchise continues to rumble on, long after its original stars Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne have moved on.

The sixth entrant in the Insidious series and a sequel to Insidious: The Red Door follows dental hygienist Gemma (Brit actress Eve), a young mother, who discovers she can enter the world of The Further, a dimension filled with evil spirits and lost souls. 

Tormented by her mother's apparent suicide in front of her, Gemma still lives in the family house, with her daughter and with memories of her mother buried in her basement. But after she first sees a trio of old people walking by her house, she begins to suffer from a series of nightmares and visions which grow in intensity and darkness.

Fearing for her life, she encounters Elise (a wonderfully warm Shaye) during one of her nightmares - and at her urging, Gemma tries to find her to get answers to her plight. But as Elise explains to her via a medium that Gemma is a Traveller who has the capability to bring things back from the Further, an evil being locks onto her with a nefarious plan.

Insidious: Out of the Further is definitely one of the creepier entrants into the franchise.

However, while there are the usual dour and dimly lit interiors to cause you to squint, there's also a fusing of liminal horror and some intense scenes which truly make this unsettling. A sequence inside the dentist chair recalls the horror of Marathon Man mixed in with the ghostly presences of the franchise.

And without giving away too much of a somewhat convoluted plot which also manages to feel somehow drawn out and undercooked, the villain of the piece comes across looking like a mix of Marilyn Manson and Iggy Pop, with a stylised bandanna across their eyes - it's not exactly a memorable demon, but with cultish overtones, there's an element of the more disturbing edges.

Yet at just over 100 minutes, Insidious: Out of the Further still feels its length in long stretches, despite the solid work put in by the almost everywoman character of Gemma. Dealing with mummy issues and guilt, as well as an inability to move, Brit actress Eve channels a more grounded approach to the infinite number of shots where mist rises from the ground.

Once again, it's Lin Shaye who adds a kind of grandmotherly tone to proceedings, the warmth and goodness exuding from the screen as she extols the kind of dialogue that revels in lines like "When one door closes in the Further, another opens" without any hint of irony.

Insidious: Out of the Further isn't a bad horror film per se; it's perfunctory in parts and solid in others, with some nicely paced scares that revels in Backrooms familiarity and nightmarish imagery from Buffy's The Gentlemen and Smile. But unfortunately, Insidious: Out of the Further does suffer from being truly unmemorable once the lights have gone up on the spook-fest. 

Perhaps it's time the (Red) Door to the Further was closed creatively for good.