Monday, July 10, 2023

Review of INSIDIOUS: THE RED DOOR: Fathers in the Further

July 10, 2023



Lorraine Lambert, mother of Josh (Patrick Wilson), had passed away, bringing with her secrets about Josh's past supernatural encounters. Josh was now divorced from his wife Renai (Rose Byrne), and his relationship with his son Dalton (Ty Simpkins) was not going smoothly. To try to improve their bond, Josh agreed to Renai's suggestion to bring Dalton to settle in at the university where he was taking up Arts.

In his class, Dalton's professor (Hiam Abbass) instructed him to look deep within himself and draw the thing he sees inside. This led Dalton to begin to paint a picture of a red door. Upon the insistence of his roommate Chris (Sinclair Daniel), Dalton reluctantly attended a party at a frat house, where he began to have ghostly visions. Meanwhile, Josh was also being terrorized by a spirit whom he realized was his father. 

This installment of the "Insidious" franchise is the direct sequel to "Insidious: Chapter 2" where we saw a possessed Josh trying to kill his whole family. Nine years later, both Josh and Dalton were unaware that they had been subjected to memory suppression to help them deal with their traumatic experiences in both the Further and the real world. This time around, these astral projection memories are coming back up to haunt them again.

The original actors who played the Lambert family in the first "Insidious" (2010) -- Patrick Wilson as Josh, Rose Byrne as Renai, Ty Simpkins as Dalton and Andrew Astor as Foster -- are all back. The boys literally have grown up before the eyes of those who have followed this franchise. Simpkins is now 21 years old, Astor is 23. The way Simpkins was styled here, he looked quite mature for his age, looking a tad too old to be Wilson's son.  

This is Patrick Wilson's directorial debut, and he did well balancing family drama with the horror. There was a lot of nostalgia seeing Lipstick-Faced Demon (Joseph Bishara), Leigh Whannell and Angus Sampson (as Specs and Tucker) and of course, the beloved Lin Shaye (as Elise Rainer) back. The jump scares were good (especially that one in the CT scan). However, the frat house humor was annoying and the final resolution felt too simplistic. 7/10.



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