Movie Review: 'Insidious: The Red Door'

Insidious The Red Door (2023)

Directed by Patrick Wilson

Written by Scott Teems

Starring Patrick Wilson, Ty Simpkins, Sinclair Daniel, Rose Byne, Lin Shaye

Release Date July 7th, 2023

Published July 7th, 2023

The key to the Insidious franchise is the wildly brilliant mind of writer-director Leigh Whannell. His consistently terrifying and inventive work on each of the Insidious films, co-writing and directing the first two and providing the screenplay for Insidious The Last Key, are proof that he's one of the modern auteurs of the horror genre. Thus, when I saw that he'd neither directed nor provided the screenplay for the latest Insidious movie, Insidious The Red Door, I was immediately skeptical. My skepticism peaked further when it was announced that star Patrick Wilson would be making his directorial debut with Insidious The Red Door.

That's not intended as a negative judgment of Wilson's work before I had seen it, rather is is just a manifestation of my overall skepticism of an Insidious sequel without the direct influence of the franchises creator and steward. Whannell does make a cameo in Insidious The Red Door, but his presence behind the camera and the keyboard becomes notable as the film goes on. Insidious The Red Door is lacking the essential ingredients of an Insidious movie, those that Whannell's fertile, creative, and slightly disturbing mind had always provided.

In his directorial debut, Patrick Wilson also stars in Insidious The Red Door, reprising his role as Joshua Lambert. As a child, Joshua discovered that he could travel into a nether-realm called The Further. There he would be menaced by demons who would attempt to steal his body to return themselves to the real world. Joshua's mother, played by Barbara Hershey, was able to rescue her son with the help of a psychic medium named Elise Rainer (Lin Shaye). Through Elise, Joshua was made to forget his ability to travel into The Further.

Cut to many years later, Josh is married to Renai (Rose Byrne), and they have three kids including their oldest, Dalton (Ty Simpkins), who has been exhibiting some odd behavior. When Dalton ends up in a coma, his grandmother recognizes what is happening and is forced to confront Joshua's past. She once again calls on Elise to save her family. The solution to the problem was supposed to be once again hypnotizing Josh and also Dalton, so that they forget about The Further. Naturally, this won't be enough to keep their memories at bay for long and that's where the story of Insidious The Red Door kicks in.

We are nearly a decade in the future from when Dalton and Joshua were hypnotized into forgetting The Further and both, father and son, are having strange dreams and fuzzy memories. For Josh, in the decade since the hypnosis, he's struggled with daily tasks and has become a shell of his former self. Things are so bad that he and Renai have separated and Joshua has become distant from his three kids, including Dalton who is now getting ready to leave for college. Since Joshua and Dalton rarely talk, Joshua volunteers to drive Dalton to his new college. This only serves to further the rift between father and son.

It takes a demon to enter the fray and bring father and son back together. Under the influence of a charismatic art teacher, played by Hiam Abbas, Dalton is encouraged to go deep into his subconscious and draw what he finds. What he finds is a door that, when Dalton draws so intensely that he cuts into his palm, turns red with his blood. Is the door a dream or a memory? That becomes a question that drives the rest of Insidious The Red Door as both Dalton and Joshua's past comes rushing back via that Red Door that we know leads to The Further and those body snatching demons.

It's not a terrible premise and it seems clear that screenwriter Scott Teems did his homework on the Insidious franchise, knowing where he can rely on franchise lore and where he can expand upon it. Unfortunately, Patrick Wilson's direction and performance are not nearly as well inspired. Wilson's direction of Insidious The Red Door is artless and perfunctory. It has a professional quality but it very clearly reveals a first time director is at the helm. Wilson is capable enough, especially when he's only concerned about creating very familiar but still quite effective jump scares, but otherwise, Wilson's direction is lacking.

Where Leigh Whannell mastered tone and pace in his Insidious movies, Wilson struggles specifically with tone and pace. Some scenes linger too long, some scenes are deeply awkward, but mostly, scenes are just there. Scenes merely exist and never really come to life from the scripted page. Take for instance the return of Lin Shaye's Elise. Clumsily used for exposition, Elise reappears in a YouTube clip and then as a beatific specter. She's not really part of the plot of Insidious The Red Door and using her this way only serves to remind us just how much we miss her presence here.

Shaye is perhaps as essential as writer-director Leigh Whannell in the success of the Insidious franchise. Seeing her again only serves to underline just how much we miss the old pro that Shaye is as the steady, charismatic center of the Insidious universe. While I fully ascribe the creative success of the franchise to Whannell's ingenious scripting and directing, I would be wrong to underappreciate just how much the three Insidious films thrived solely because of Shaye's inimitable presence, authority, and sympathy.

I don't think Insidious The Red Door is a bad movie. Rather, it is more of a middling movie. It's modestly successful in being competent and in not dragging down the franchise as a whole. That said, where the other parts of the Insidious franchise feel essential, alive and worthy of being remembered as a significant modern horror franchise, Insidious The Red Door is unquestionably weaker than the rest of the franchise. The lack of essential elements and Wilson's novice, rudimentary, direction, hold Insidious The Red Door back from being on par with what is among the best modern horror franchises going today.

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