My quick rating – 5.9/10. There are few things more unsettling than a creepy old house, a mysterious dead realm, and a mother who can’t get five minutes of peace. Raising a child is hard enough without discovering you can bring home unwanted guests from the afterlife. Forget bad parenting, Gemma may have just invented the world’s worst playdate in Insidious: Out of the Further
We open on a rainy day in Pittsburgh, 1999, with a young girl arriving at the house of Ingrid and Gemma. The mailbox confirms she’s in the right place, and a woman passed out face-down on the table barely registers as a problem. The girl calmly puts the phone back on the hook and gets on with the laundry. Ah, childhood! Nothing says a stable home environment quite like doing the washing while Mum’s temporarily checked out of reality. When Ingrid (Laura Gordon) eventually returns to the land of the living, she doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the household’s mental health.
Twenty years later, Gemma (Amelia Eve) is raising her daughter Maya (Island Austin) in the same house. The mailbox now lists both their names, and apparently the family business is still going strong. Gemma discovers she can enter The Further, that purgatorial playground of lost souls, but her particular talent comes with an unfortunate upgrade. She can bring its inhabitants back with her. Because simply visiting the land of the dead apparently wasn’t enough of a headache.
Director Jacob Chase delivers some creepy visuals, a handful of freaky dreams that bleed into reality, and the usual jump-scare shenanigans without going completely overboard. The dental scene involving an old man is uncomfortable enough before the bizarre stuff kicks in, while the pillow fort sequence is another welcome highlight. Building blanket forts was never this bloody terrifying. Thankfully, the movie also avoids one of horror’s most irritating clichés – everyone dismissing the protagonist as a lunatic while she desperately tries to explain the obvious. Gemma’s cop boyfriend gets some firsthand experience instead. Imagine dating someone and discovering her supernatural baggage comes with actual baggage.
It’s also great to see Lin Shaye back, even if she’s hanging around The Further. She brings some welcome class to proceedings, because nothing says prestige quite like a horror veteran showing up in a dimension where common sense goes to die.
Unfortunately, the novelty wears thin. Gemma bops in and out of The Further so frequently that it starts feeling less like a terrifying purgatory and more like popping over to borrow a cup of sugar. There are a couple of decent ideas here, but the surrounding formula feels painfully familiar. The first thirty minutes are strong, and the story has enough going for it to keep things watchable, but the franchise needs a genuinely fresh hook if it wants to do anything more than rearrange the furniture in the afterlife.
Insidious: Out of the Further is a decent horror-thriller that leans more heavily on the thriller side. It doesn’t match the original trilogy, but it does edge out The Last Key and The Red Door. Not exactly a trip to paradise, but at least you won’t need to call a priest to get through it.
