Door #6
Newcomer Jacob Chase finds a surprisingly scenic way through The Further, or whatever it’s called.
INsidious: OUt of the Further
Director: Jacob Chase • Writer: Jacob Chase
Starring: Amelia Eve, Island Austin, Sam Spruell, Lin Shaye, Brandon Perea
USA • 1hr 46mins
Opens Hong Kong August 20 • IIB
Grade: B
There’s something not right going on in a sprawling, anonymous suburban house on a leafy street in 1999. An equally anonymous school kid, 12-year-old-ish Gemma gets home to what we’re led to believe is a regular scene. Her mother Ingrid (Laura Gordon) is passed out at the dining table, the house silent and dim, like it’s been boarded up. Gemma goes about her business of doing her homework (she’s a straight-A student) and making her own dinner, yet another roast turkey frozen meal from storage, and doing her own laundry. Nothing wrong with teach kids responsibility and how not to suck at life but this seems extreme. This is an Insidious movie so before you can say “Boo!” Ingrid is racing around the house like a cat with zoomies, yelling at nobody and scaring the bejeezus out of Gemma. The weirdness ends when Ingrid locks herself in the bathroom and beats herself to death. Yikes.
Picking up literally days after the events of seeming series capper Insidious: The Red Door, Insidious: Out of the Further picks up the baton in the race to prove no franchise is ever too long in the tooth or ever really ends. The Red Door did nothing to suggest we needed more of these movies, no matter how truly creepy the original was. It was getting repetitive and flat-out boring. But hey, small miracles do happen, because while Out of the Further isn’t particularly groundbreaking, and it is very Insidious-y, incoming (mostly) short film director Jacob Chase has conjured a perfectly decent chiller from the wreckage of the series and injected it with some legit new life. Who’d-a-guessed?
Start your lanterns!
Considering the previous five – five! – Insidious films have made it rain to the tune of roughly US$750 million worldwide on a paltry US$60 million in costs, it’s really no surprise this sixth entry exists, or that a seventh (!!) is in development (Thread: An Insidious Tale). So the Horror Dream Team of The Conjuring honcho James Wan, Paranormal Activity’s Oren Peli, Saw mastermind Leigh Whannell and Jason Blum, boss at, erm, Blumhouse put some more pennies together, tapped a relatively unknown director – Chase only has a couple of features under his belt, including the little seen 2020 horror Come Play – and voila. An entirely entertaining refresh with at least three stellar set pieces, one of them among the most visceral and unforgettable in a hot minute (looking at you, Bring Her Back).
Twenty years later and now-grown Gemma (Not Naomi Watts, Amelia Eve) is a dental hygienist still living in the house her mother died in with her own daughter, Maya (Island Austin) and oh, hell yes. It’s a modern horror so the key phrase is generational trauma. Gemma’s doing her best to not be Ingrid, but when she starts drifting into The Further she eventually runs into über-ghostbuster Elise Rainier (Lin Shaye, legend), who informs her via medium Clare (Maisie Richardson-Sellers, Legends of Tomorrow) that 1) she’s a traveller, and she can bring stuff out of The Further and into the real world and that 2) dead cult leader and murderer Cyrus (Sam Spruell, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms) is targeting her power to get his and his minions’ asses back to reality. This they learn from Gemma’s down-low boyfriend, local cop Nick Mendoza (Brandon Perea, Nope). That’s all that’s needed to crack out the lanterns and dry ice.
In all honesty there’s something comforting about Out of the Further’s familiar beats and instantly recognisable Insidious tropes. We know what we’re going to get from this, so it makes it easy to sit back and just see if the sinister (I know, another series) shit pays off. Chase leans into the matrilineal “gift” of travelling as inherited trauma that stays in line with current horror trends, and Eve does a solid job of making Gemma’s “Am I insane?” or “Is there supernatural shit in my house?” toggle believable. Chase sprinkles that with the other favourite: the cult, which gives a nice specificity to the demons. But he has a few tricks up his sleeve that keep things suitably unsettling and original, at least for this series. Maya’s harmless sofa fort becomes a nightmarish, claustrophobic maze one evening for Gemma, the first time she encounters the creepy AF neighbours – one of whom is a sort of discount Angus Scrimm in Phantasm – that have way more to do with all this than they seem. It’s scary and funny and tense, and it works because Chase makes the most of the mundane living room accessories we all know so well. The sequence everyone might wind up talking about, though, is aforementioned neighbour Lester’s (Joseph Lopez, the passenger of The Passenger) visit to Gemma’s clinic for a cleaning. Dentistry is among the world’s most common squicks, and it’s hard to think of any film since Marathon Man (a political thriller) or Little Shop of Horrors (musical comedy) that’s exploited that quite as well as Chase does here. It. Is. Grim. But it’s also a nearly perfect blend of ratcheting tension and gross-out visual – and sound! – effects. Gack. In a good way.