Insidious: The Red Door

I was actually quite fond of Insidious and Insidious Part Two. Yes, I'll admit that I generally like director James Wan's camera style and technical acumen when it comes to positioning, movement and suspense. No, he's not a storyteller like Ari Aster and Jordan Peele, but he has an eye for solid scene building.

So it was a shame to see him move on to other things, leaving Insidious to less talented directors, but now it's back, and in the hands of a really, really underrated actor, Patrick Wilson, who has made Insidious: The Red Door his directorial debut.

The Red Door is actually a sort of chronological sequel to Part Two, as it focuses once again on the Lambert family and how their relationship with The Further (a sort of shadow dimension below us that harbours both ghosts and demons) has twisted their relationship. Not only does Wilson himself return as Josh, Ty Simpkins returns as the now half-grown son Dalton, as does Rose Byrne as Renai. The family is reunited, which means that The Red Door is already better than the mediocre prequels on several classic parameters.

Wilson strikes a delicate balance most of the time between exposition-driven melodrama and more intense horror set-ups. The entire film actually belongs to Simpkin's Dalton and Wilson's Josh, and while The Red Door has a lot going for it, it's essentially a "Sins of the Father" narrative, with Josh and Dalton each struggling with their respective upbringings and the fact that they'll probably never fully shed their connection to The Further.

It's not like Wilson is reinventing the wheel here, or even swapping the series' classic set-ups for a different and innovative approach. There's a build-up with plenty of suspense and discordant strumming of stringed instruments that leads to a hair-raising moment. Insidious is Insidious, for better or worse, but as effective as it was the first time round? Well, The Red Door doesn't manage to do that.

Most annoyingly, Rose Byrne's Renai is reduced to a walking cliché that does little more than react to what Dalton and Josh do. Not only that, some phone conversations with Renai function almost entirely as an unwelcome serving of exposition. It's just bad storytelling.

Insidious: The Red Door is at its best when Wilson takes his time, and there are five or six times where he builds up a single sequence over many minutes and really utilises suspense in a more classic way. It works like a gold medal and is sometimes of the same calibre as the best scenes from The Conjuring, for example.

The Red Door isn't perfect, far from it. But it's one of the better horror films to watch in 2023, no doubt about it.