Insidious: Out of the Further

We discover from fairly early on that the young "Gemma" (Charli Penton) is usually left to her own devices by her clearly distracted mother, so it's no surprise when we spin forward a generation and discover that she (now Amelie Eve) has had to deal with a fairly traumatic experience before going on to becoming a dentist and raising her own daughter "Maya" (Island Austin) in the very same house. She's been dating, on the quiet, the hunky cop "Nick" (Brandon Perez) and all in her life seems stable until a visit to the basement with her child unearths some old family memorabilia - and then things start going bump in her dreams. A terrifying experience in a pillow fort and an even more gruesome one in her own dental practice encourages her to seek advice from "Clare" (Maisie Richardson-Sellars) who acts as a conduit to the world of the benign "Elise" (Lin Shaye) who explains something of the evil that is trying to escape from the "Further" realm and invade the world of the living with a population of zombified and hungry corpses. It seems that "Gemma" has a special gift that has attracted this menace and that it won't stop until she stops it. How? Well that's going to involve convincing "Maya" and her boyfriend that she's not lost the plot and that the dangers are real. There are a few genuinely affecting scenes here - especially amidst the ostensible safety of cushions and sheets, but the rest of this lacks much by way of jeopardy. Regular watchers of these films will probably agree that the supposedly insurmountable barriers between the malignant, the nefarious, the past and the present all appear to be wafer thin with an all too familiar surfeit of connecting two-way red doors. The acting is all fine and some of the photography does help to craft a certain sense of peril, but this isn't so much insidious as straightforward and though it does have it's moments, it's a franchise that has had it's day and ought now to be put in a box of it's own in the cellar with a label saying "open in fifty years".

*Insidious: Out of the Further* isn't reinventing the wheel on its sixth go-around, but it delivers enough legitimate chills to earn its keep. Directed by Jacob Chase, the film shines brightest when it leans into surreal visual set pieces—including a nauseatingly tense dental-chair sequence and a claustrophobic, spatial-warping couch fort. Amelia Eve gives a strong, grounded lead performance, and Lin Shaye’s return as Elise Rainier provides the usual warm, ghostly nostalgia that ties the franchise together. Movie relies a bit too heavily on loud, predictable jump scares though. It doesn't reach the heights of James Wan's original films, but with solid lead performances and a few standout sequences, it’s a fun, spooky ride that lands at a comfortable 7/10.