Director – Patrick Wilson, Screenplay – Scott Teems, Story – Scott Teems & Leigh Whannell, Producers – Jason Blum, Oren Peli, James Wan & Leigh Whannell, Photography – Autumn Eakin, Music – Joseph Bishara, Visual Effects – Stargate Studios (Lead Supervisor – Caleb Kneuven), Special Effects Supervisor – Eugene Hitt, Prosthetic Makeup – Fractured FX (Designer – Justin Raleigh), Production Design – Adam Reamer. Production Company – Screen Gems/Stage 6/Blumhouse.
Cast
Ty Simpkins (Dalton Lambert), Patrick Wilson (Josh Lambert), Sinclair Daniel (Chris Winslow), Rose Byrne (Renai Lambert), Hiam Abbass (Professor Armagan), Peter Dager (Nick the Dick), Andrew Astor (Foster Lambert), Lin Shaye (Elise Rainier), Steve Coulter (Carl), Leigh Whannell (Specs), Angus Sampson (Tucker)
Plot
Josh Lambert has a hypnotist erase all memory of the previous twelve months of his and son Dalton’s lives. Nine years later, he and Renai have separated and Josh is aware that he is not a good parent to Dalton. Following the funeral of his mother, Renai volunteers Josh to drive Dalton to college where he is going to study art. In class, Dalton’s professor asks the students to dig deep down into their unconscious and paint what they see. Dalton does a painting of a red door. As he continues to obsess over the painting, Dalton finds that has awakened something in himself and that he can astrally travel but also sees disturbing things. At the same time, Josh is plagued by nightmares and hallucinations and driven to remember the things he has blanked from his memory.
Insidious (2010) was a medium-budgeted film from Blumhouse directed by James Wan and starring Patrick Wilson as a parent caught up in a series of astral projection nightmares. Wan created something undeniably spooky and the result caught on with audiences with the film going on to earn over $100 million worldwide. Wan and Wilson followed it up with the even more successful Insidious Chapter 2 (2013). The series writer Leigh Whannell took over the director’s chair for Insidious Chapter 3 (2015), which went back to tell earlier events, while Insidious: The Last Key (2018) from another director was a mix of past and present focusing on Lin Shaye’s medium Elise Rainier. All films grossed well over the $100 million threshold worldwide. For the fifth film, the series again returns to tell the story of the Lambert family, while Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne return to their roles with Wilson taking over the director’s chair.
Insidious: The Red Door immediately takes two steps backwards from the rest of the series. For one, the very first scene has the major improbability of a set-up where Patrick Wilson asks a hypnotist to erase all memory of the events of the first two films, although the story is such that you know that he is going to have to recover them by the end of the film. When the characters in a sequel are placed in a position where they have to spend half the film catching up to what the audience knows, this becomes an exercise in tedium.
The other step is from moving away from further adventures of Josh to placing the focus on the son Dalton, the now grown Ty Simpkins. Although he still spends a good amount of time on screen, Patrick Wilson has graciously allowed the unknown Simpkins to receive the top billing. I began to appreciate Wilson going out on a limb in the early scenes and playing a bad father but really the whole film is a redemption arc – it is the reverse of the usual daddy issues and more about the redemption of a father with son issues. On the other hand, Ty Simpkins does little to take advantage of his starring turn and seems only broody and withdrawn, while allowing the far more lively Sinclair Daniel to run rings around him.
Patrick Wilson (also the film’s director) on his phone as an ominous figure approaches his vehicle
Insidious: The Red Door is not entirely awful, but it still doesn’t shake the tedium that beleaguered Chapter 3 and The Last Key. Patrick Wilson has clearly been hanging out with James Wan so long now – through the first two Insidious and the first two The Conjuring films – that he has either osmotically absorbed or sat down to get a few directorial tips from him. This is evident from a scene not far in where Wilson sits in his vehicle after the funeral on his phone as an indistinct figure appears behind. There is nothing overtly sinister as the figure approaches but it feels ominous, especially when Wilson dips his head down and the figure is gone when he sits back up. All the ominous effect in the scene is conducted without the use of any sound effects.
On the other hand, when Wilson conducts a similar scene in the middle of the film with another figure appearing outside the house as he flips pieces of cardboard pasted to his window up and down, the effect is ruined the moment it turns into a jumpshock with a person smashing in through the window to attack. Throughout the film, scenes vie between these moments where Wilson gets what Wan does well and others where he clumsily mishandles a scene.
There are other scenes that come with some undeniable effect – one where Patrick Wilson is inside a CAT scan and uncannily sees a creature start climbing up the tube; or the eerie scene where Ty Simpkins astrally projects for the first time and walks into Sinclair Daniel’s room. On the other hand, these sit alongside others that flop – the diversion to a frat party feels pointless with scenes of Ty Simpkins having hallucinations of a dead guy vomiting into the toilet and then appearing to projectile vomit directly into his mouth from where Ty hides under the bed. The latter scenes venturing back into The Further become the least interesting – where they were the most eerie aspects of the first two films, here they just become a series of pop-up shock jumps that blur into a single lack of effect.
