Movie Review – Insidious

Insidious (2010)
Written by Leigh Whanell
Directed by James Wan

I’ve never seen one of the Saw films, and I probably never will. Just doesn’t look like my thing. However, I remember being curious about the stylized world of James Wan’s follow-up franchise, Insidious. I saw the film at the time of its release and remember being somewhat entertained. I decided to watch the whole series this year because the fifth film was released. I found that the things I remember liking about this first film had aged poorly. In fact, I am confident in saying I think Insidious is the most boring, least coherent horror franchise I’ve ever seen. And I’ve watched all the Halloween movies, so that’s saying a lot.

Josh (Patrick Wilson) and Renai (Rose Byrne) Lambert have moved into a new house with their three kids. One night, the eldest Dalton (Ty Simpkins) sneaks into the attic, where he briefly comes in contact with a mysterious entity. The next day, he slips into a coma, and doctors can’t explain what is happening to the boy. People start appearing and disappearing in the Lamberts’ house. Noises wake up the family in the middle of the night. Renai eventually believes this new house is haunted, so they pack up again and move. The supernatural activity continues in the new home, and Josh’s mother, Lorraine (Barbara Hershey), suggests the family get experts to clean the house. Cue Elise Rainier (Lin Shaye) and her team of Specs (Leigh Wahnell) & Tucker (Angus Sampson). 

Elise reveals that the house is not haunted. Instead, it is the child. She explains the concept of The Further, a limbo dimension where troubled souls wander and those, like Dalton, who can astral project explore in their dreams. These angry specters try to latch onto these travelers’ vacated bodies to enter the material world. According to Elise, a demon with designs on Dalton plans to take the child’s body unless someone can stop him. 

I want to say that Malignant is a far more entertaining James Wan film than a single Insidious picture I watched over the last week. There are a lot of interesting pieces set out in the first half of this movie, which then gets flushed in the second once The Further and astral projection becomes a part of the explanation. I didn’t find the ghosts all that scary because, save for maybe two of them, none of the spirits really do anything that dangerous. It’s clear that in the waking world, they have little power, and so the most they can do is spook you. Am I supposed to be scared that a little ghost boy is playing a Tiny Tim record and dancing? You could say it is creepy, but that’s about it.

There’s some craft at work. Wan tries to keep the camera and framing interesting for the most part. This was clearly shot on an older digital camera, and it shows. The colors are also very muddy & washed out, which I didn’t think was a terrific aesthetic for the picture. I preferred more color saturation, which we do get in the sequel. When I initially saw the film, I thought the ghosts were scary, but now they feel like a less creepy version of the haunts you’d see in something like The House on Haunted Hill remake. 

There’s clear inspiration coming from pictures like Poltergeist, but Insidious lacks the character development of that older film. In Tobe Hooper’s horror classic, we genuinely care about the family when things get terrible. We want them to find a solution and get out of this nightmare. Most of the performances in this film are flat. Rose Byrne is the best of the lot, but everyone else is playing very stock characters. Patrick Wilson has rarely impressed me, and this doesn’t remedy that. For a character so crucial to the plot, Josh is an extraordinarily uncharismatic or interesting one. 

Insidious had the potential to be a mind-bending horror trip, but it constantly plays things safe. Its budget wasn’t anything spectacular, but it still could have done something more interesting. While I am not a big fan of The Conjuring series, I at least cared more about those characters than the Lambert family in this series. As we continue through the films, another point of contention is that the series never really settles on who or what it is about. Films one, two, and five are about the Lambert family, with them making cameos in the other pictures. Elise appears in every movie, but only four & five really center her as the protagonist. Elise’s explanation of The Further is about the only details we ever get on these spirits. 

The Lipstick Demon and The Bride are shown in almost every picture. We get a very problematic origin for The Bride, which we’ll discuss in our next review, but after five movies, I couldn’t tell you much about the Lipstick Demon. His motivations are never completely clear; he’s just scary and evil. That could work, but the franchise is one where it feels like there should be more depth to the lore. Instead, everything skims along the surface.

It’s not a good sign when your first entry in a multi-film franchise leaves viewers bored. It feels like an idea where the creators had a lot of enthusiasm going in, and somewhere along the way, the steam ran out. The Further is not that compelling of an idea. It feels like a dozen other things we’ve seen in horror, and there’s never an effort to make it feel distinguished from any other generic fictional limbo. It’s just a big dark space with fog on the ground. While I may not be a fan of Stranger Things, at least the Upside Down has personality; it feels like a distinct reality. The sensibilities at work here feel very middle school, a type of horror meant to spook children, not adults. It is PG-13, so that tracks. Yeah, I’m not looking forward to having to write about how much I dislike each of these films.