MY CALL: This recent attempt to defibrillate the franchise is a finely produced “soft PG-13” horror that seems best suited for anyone who felt that parts 1-4 were too scary. MOVIES LIKE Insidious 5: Insidious (2011), Insidious Chapter 2 (2013), Insidious Chapter 3 (2015; a positive review and a more negative review), and Insidious 4: The Last Key (2018). I’d also suggest venturing deep into the Waniverse with The Conjuring (2013), Annabelle (2014), The Conjuring 2 (2016) and Annabelle: Creation (2017) to round out the first half of the The Conjuring Universe.
Franchise Timeline SIDEBAR: Here are the movies in chronological order… Insidious Chapter 3 (2015), Insidious 4: The Last Key (2018), Insidious (2011), Insidious Chapter 2 (2013), Insidious 5: The Red Door (2023).
Nine years after the events of Insidious Chapter 2 (2013) and memory suppression hypnotherapy to forget the horrible events and The Further, we catch up with the Lamberts. They have just lost their kids’ grandmother, gone through a divorce, Dalton (Ty Simpkins) is about to leave for college, Josh (Patrick Wilson) is trying to find ways to reconnect, and both of them feel displaced without knowing why. We don’t spend a lot of time on this introduction, but the emotional tension feels palpable and credibly lived-in.
Dalton has lived with the knowledge that he spent his 10th year of life in a coma, and he understands very little about it much to his frustration. But as both father and son wrestle with their past, Dalton’s new art professor (Hiam Abbass) mentors him to disconnect from this past and embrace the future. In a class exercise, Dalton’s Further-suppressing hypnosis seems to be reversed and he effects on paper The Red Door. Meanwhile, Josh seeks medical help for the emotional fog and disconnection in his life, beginning with an MRI, which likewise seems to trigger a reopening to his connection to The Further. Both endure unpleasant visions, including a truly horrifying (or maybe just ultra-gross) vomit scene. For me, this grossness was the best part of the movie.
And now, of course, this means we revisit The Further. Unfortunately, this doesn’t come with the unique demons and harrowing visuals of past sequels. These visuals feel simultaneously unoriginal and phoned-in, with monstrosities which feel much less otherworldly (but more like simple goblins or zombies), and seem less powerful, menacing and dire than past Further demonic iterations. So unless the goal was to lighten the franchise for a younger, greener, weaker-stomached audience, I’d say this otherwise well-produced and well-acted sequel is something of a failure. Moreover, it completely squanders the atmosphere and terror for which it was once known. The creep factor in this movie is perhaps an all-time franchise low, and the cultivation of dread is woefully very limited. Even the revisited, once-terrifying denizens of this spirit realm are now presented as little more than glimpses of Carnival Funhouse Horrors.
This movie starts out strong, middles moderately, and finishes weakly. With all of the teen-college vibe and the generally lighter execution of the horror, this is about as PG-13 as PG-13 gets. But it’s definitely well made in terms of the non-horror components of the film. All told, I hope this can be the end of it. Instead of trying to defibrillate this franchise again, can we just try something new instead?