Insidious: The Red Door Review

Insidious: The Red Door is the fifth film in the Insidious series and sees the return of the Lambert family for the first time since 2013.

After the events of Insidious: Chapter 2, Josh Lambert (Patrick Wilson) and his son, Dalton (Ty Simpkins) have their memories erased of Dalton’s coma, Josh’s possession, and suppressing their powers. Nine years later Dalton is about to go to college to study art, but his relationship with his father has become strained. Even worse, the father and son start to experience the presence of supernatural entities.

The Insidious series has been a highly profitable one for Blumhouse. The production costs are low and they have all been profitable. Insidious: The Red Door has already made a profit over its first weekend of release. However, on a critical level, the Insidious series has been suffering from diminishing returns. The scores on Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB show this downward trajectory.

After Chapter 2, the series didn’t seem to know where to go. Chapter 3 and The Last Key were prequels that focused on Lin Shaye’s character and those films were going over the same territory as the first film. All these films showed someone becoming haunted by something from The Further with characters needing to go into The Further to stop it. The Red Door seemed like it was moving the series forward by looking at what happened next for the Lamberts. However, The Red Door had a sense of repetition.

The setup of the film led to this repetition. The characters were having to solve a mystery that the audience already knew the answer to. The characters were repeating the same mistakes of the first two films where Josh’s powers were suppressed, which left the family unprepared for another attack from The Further.

The Red Door was plotted like it was made for audience members who hadn’t seen the previous films. Yet there were also lots of references to the first two films and trying to have some emotional resonance through the character of Elise Rainier. The film was trying to satisfy new viewers and people familiar with the series, but it ended up pleasing no one.

The Red Door was the first Insidious film not written by Leigh Whannell. He only has a story credit. The Aussie filmmaker has gone off to bigger and better things with Upgrade and The Invisible Man. Scott Teems took over the writing duties. Teems was a downgrade considering his previous credits which included Halloween Kills and Firestarter (2022). This was shown with The Red Door having the least drive in the series. In the other films, a family had to overcome a malicious presence, but in The Red Door, Dalton saw the ghosts who were suffering, like the victim of a fraternity. It made the film feel more like The Sixth Sense than an Insidious film since they were just ordinary people turned into ghosts.

Confounding The Red Door was its cliched writing and direction. It was a typical story of father-and-son having a fractious relationship but this was acceptable since it was the theme of the film. Dalton hated his father for leaving his mother, and Josh felt the same about his father. The journey for both characters was to realise what their fathers did for them and repair their relationships. The cliches weren’t so forgivable beyond that. A great example of this was Dalton who went to his first art class and the teacher tells the class to rip up their work and forget the rules of art. I was thinking of similar scenes in The Simpsons and American Dad.

The Red Door served as Patrick Wilson’s directorial debut. There have been plenty of actors who have transitioned to directing horror films, like Jordan Peele and John Krasinski and Wilson has experience in the horror genre since he’s one of the leads of the Conjuring series. However, Wilson has only learned one trick: jump scares. The scares could be seen from miles away, like when Josh was trapped in a CT scanner. Wilson and his team just ramped up the volume so audiences could react. It was lazy.

The Red Door shows that the Insidious franchise has little life left in both the story and scare departments. It was a film made for a quick financial return instead of a creative desire.