Insidious: Out of the Further Review: Six Movies In and Pushing It Further

It’s not often you get six movies into a horror franchise and somebody finds a new direction to take it that actually works.

By that point, you usually know the drill. The mythology has been stretched about as far as it can go, the scares are variations of things you’ve already seen and everybody involved is desperately searching the couch cushions for whatever ideas might still be hiding under there.

Insidious: Out of the Further is a noticeably better movie than Insidious: Chapter 3 and The Last Key, and as someone who was also a fan of The Red Door, I didn’t go into this thinking the franchise needed to be rescued. But this is exactly the kind of turn a series this far along needs.

Instead of dragging another Lambert family story out of storage, Out of the Further introduces Gemma, played by Amelia Eve, a mother who discovers that her connection to The Further comes with a pretty significant new wrinkle: she can bring things back with her.

That opens up The Further in a way the previous movies haven’t, while still feeling like it belongs in the same universe. Six movies in, that’s a rare accomplishment.

Of course, everybody is going to want to know the same thing.

Is it scary?

Yeah. It is.

Out of the Further is PG-13, but that doesn’t take anything away from the horror. There’s still a good amount of blood, but more importantly, the movie knows how to build tension. At no point did I feel like I was watching some watered-down version of an Insidious movie designed to make sure nobody under 17 gets too upset.

The scares are allowed to breathe.

The three old crones you see in the trailer are good as these weird, almost side protagonists throughout the movie, and the new big bad is pretty much a complete 180 from the Red-Faced Demon. Think less demonic Darth Maul and more Jim Morrison meets The Further.

It works. But he still felt like the weakest next to KeyFace from The Last Key. I don’t see him having the staying power of the Woman in Black, but I think he’d make a great-looking Funko Pop.

There are two sequences in particular that really stood out to me: the pillow fort and the dentist’s office.

The dentist scene alone makes me want to skip my cleaning next month.

Thanks, but I’ll keep the cavities.

Sometimes all a recipe needs is some fresh eyes, and I think that’s exactly what happened here with Jacob Chase. He directed Come Play a few years ago, which I thought was okay, but it seems like he got his reps in between then and now because this is a much stronger movie.

Can we just pretend this is his sophomore effort and ignore the stuff nobody saw?

Because whatever happened between Come Play and this, Chase seems considerably more confident behind the camera. He understands when to show you something, when not to and, most importantly, when to make you wait for it.

But the biggest reason Out of the Further works isn’t the monsters.

It’s the people.

It’s great having Lin Shaye back in the spotlight. Elise Rainier is in a good chunk of this movie, and Shaye is excellent because Shaye is excellent in damn near everything she’s in. That said, the nature of Elise’s role does limit what Shaye can actually do here. They’ve spent multiple movies finding ways to keep Elise around because they know how important she is to Insidious. I’m glad she’s here, and she absolutely makes the most of what she’s given, but I’d still rather have an Elise who wasn’t stuck working around the fact that the franchise killed one of its best characters in the first movie.

I still miss Specs and Tucker.

The real heart of this movie, though, belongs to Amelia Eve and Island Austin as the mother and daughter at the center of the story. Both are excellent.

What their story ultimately deals with is something much more interesting than simply being the latest family unlucky enough to have The Further come knocking at the door. It’s about the emotional damage we sometimes do to the people we love in the name of trying to save them.

That becomes especially complicated when it’s a parent and a child.

Parents make decisions because we believe we’re protecting our kids. Sometimes we’re right. Sometimes the things we do to protect them leave scars of their own.

Out of the Further understands that.

And because the relationship between Gemma and her daughter actually matters, the supernatural shit surrounding them matters more too.

Austin, in particular, gets handed a lot of the heavy lifting in the second half of the movie and handles it extremely well. She’s great here, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this ends up being the beginning of a much bigger career for her.

The rest of the cast is good too, but it’s Shaye, Eve and Austin who give the movie the weight it needs. The horror works because the people at the center of it work first.

That’s ultimately what surprised me most about Insidious: Out of the Further.

This would have been an easy movie to phone in.

It’s number six. The brand is established. The Further is established. Elise is established. Put another creepy demon in a dark hallway, blast the soundtrack when something jumps into frame and call it a day.

Instead, Jacob Chase came in and found another door.

And damned if it wasn’t worth opening.