Insidious: Out of the Further Review: Time to Close the Door

Imagine a Halloween haunted house. The first year you go, everything is new and exciting and every scare is fresh. The second year is fun in a different way, as you kind of know what’s going to happen but this time you can look for what’s new and appreciate the experience a little more. Now imagine the sixth year of the same haunt, the owners haven’t really changed much up, there’s a few new monsters but nothing that memorable, and all in all it just feels like everyone’s stopped trying.

That’s very much the experience of Insidious: Out of the Further, the unexpected sixth episode in creator Leigh Whannell’s paranormal horror franchise. I say unexpected because audiences thought that the series, with its ripsaw back-and-forth timeline, had come to an end with 2023’s Insidious: The Red Door. That film seemed to have finally wrapped up the saga of the Lambert family and the Lipstick-Faced Demon, even if a closing stinger had threatened that there were more adventures to be had in the uncanny realm of the Further.

While the Lipstick-Faced Demon does turn up for a spit and a cough, the Lamberts sit this one out as Out of the Further drags dental hygienist Gemma (Amelia Eve, The Haunting of Bly Manor) into the shadowy realm. She’s laden down with one of the hoariest tropes of horror cinema, the legacy of a crazed suicidal mother whose descent into madness still haunts her. Not enough to sell the family home that Mommy Dearest killed herself in, though, because all families in an Insidious film live in an oversized single family suburban midcentury house (demons seemingly require either a cellar or a finished attic). Now Gemma is raising her own daughter (Island Austin) as a single mom uncovering her family’s long, weird connection to the Further.

The Red Door that connects our world and the Further may as well be revolving, so many spirits come through. Thus, being dead doesn’t stop psychic demon-buster Elise Rainier (Lin Shaye) from coming to Gemma’s aid as she lights her way back to the real world. By which I mean, she seems to clout demons around the head with a camping light. The absolute heart and soul of the franchise, Shaye may well have shot her entire performance in one afternoon, and even one of Elise’s biggest speeches is actually delivered via grapefruits (you read that right) tattooed by her Earth-bound ally, new medium Claire (Maisie Richardson-Sellers).

Everything about the franchise at this stage seems rigorously competent but worn out. Whannell’s original idea of the Further being little more than a blank space now makes it all look like black box theatre with some spooky mist. It’s also clear that the franchise should have wrapped up with The Red Door as, aside from some returning spirits as background extras, this feels disconnected from the rest of the series. If anything, the new villain, the spirit of a murderous cult leader (Sam Spruell) trying to come back to life with a hellish army, makes it all suspiciously similar to the plot of Ghostbusters II. Overall, it’s hard to ignore the creeping suspicion that the producers just lazily slapped the word “Insidious” on an unrelated script and said, “Good enough.”

As for the straight horror aspects, writer/director Jacob Chase proved his workmanlike skills with 2020’s Come Play but gets bogged down in the Insidious universe’s tried-and-tested language of jump scare, jump scare, spooky thing in the background, jump scare, funky lighting and fog, jump scare. There’s one memorable set piece involving a living room blanket fortress, but such moments are overwhelmed by a combination of overly-familiar shocks and a huge amount of gross-out mouth trauma.

Insidious: Out of the Further

2026, PG-13, 106 min. Directed by Jacob Chase. Starring Amelia Eve, Lin Shaye, Sam Spruell, Maisie Richardson-Sellers, Laura Gordon, Island Austin, Brandon Perea.

⭐⭐

Rating: 2 out of 5.

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