Movie Review – Insidious: Chapter 2

Insidious: Chapter 2 (2013)
Written by Leigh Whanell
Directed by James Wan

The first Insidious felt like it was always made with a sequel in mind. It makes sense that James Wan & Leigh Whanell had a lot of success with the Saw franchise, so they wanted to repeat it with something new. Insidious Chapter 2 picks up exactly where the first film ends and never feels like it’s creating a story where there is none. Loose ends from the first picture are continued and resolved, so the conclusion is an excellent place for the series to stop. Of course, that won’t happen, and three more movies will come later. I didn’t enjoy the first entry in this series, and it won’t surprise you that I enjoyed this picture even less. 

Before showing us the aftermath of the first film’s ending, we jump back to 1986, where a young Elise arrives at the Lamberts’ house to help Josh as a child. This leads to a brief encounter with The Bride entity. In the present, Renai (Rose Byrne) is being questioned after discovering Elise’s (Lin Shaye) dead body in her home after pulling Dalton from his coma. Renai has seen the Polaroid Elise took before she was murdered and knows that Josh (Patrick Wilson) has been possessed by The Bride but keeps quiet while trying to figure out how to end this curse. 

Specs and Tucker (Whanell and Angus Sampson) visit Elise’s house to help clear up her affairs. They contact one of the psychic’s old associates, Karl (Steve Coulter), after they become aware of Elise’s spirit, who is trying to communicate something from beyond the grave. Through a videotape, Elise made the trio learn that the Further doesn’t follow the same linear flow of time as the living experience. It also clues them in on the true nature of Josh, which his mother Lorraine (Barbara Hershey) has realized with the family living in her house now. 

The first thing I want to say about this film is that they did some gross shit by making the antagonist transgender. I’ve realized in the last year that the stories I grew up hearing in America about “the crazy lady who dressed her son up like a girl” were transphobic obfuscations of the truth. What was more likely happening was that these women were mothers who accepted and loved their children and allowed them to live in the identity they were most comfortable with. The reactionaries in these communities just couldn’t process how someone could love their child unconditionally because they’d never experienced that. So they fabricated stories about how these mothers were evil & wrong, and they were forcing their kids to do this. It’s the same incoherent shit being regurgitated across the States right now, where parents are only in the right in the reactionary mind if they force their kid to adhere to some cruel & often arbitrary hierarchy of power.

Making The Bride a male character forced to live as a girl by their crazy mother is a lazy trope that doesn’t have a place in modern horror. You see the same dumb thing in a cult film like Sleepaway Camp, which I can sort of give a pass to because Angela takes out a lot of annoying dickheads at that summer camp. There is nothing redeemable or sympathetic here about The Bride, just a ravenous raging monster. That’s the problem with all the ghosts throughout this series: they have no discernable personalities or clear goals. Sometimes, it seems like they want to kill people, but then they try to possess those same people. After the first film, I thought the series would start to clarify some of the rules about supernatural beings in this world, but it really doesn’t. And neither to the subsequent films.

The transgender horror trope never adds anything to the story, and it also doesn’t make sense why he wants to possess Josh. Because The Bride never has her goals outlined, I am left confused. Does she not want to live as a woman? Why does she manifest in such a way? There’s also the reveal that this character was a serial killer in their adult life, another gross thing mass media tries to connect with trans people despite the fact there’s absolutely no link between being transgender and murderers. His mother’s ghost drives his insanity, but I don’t understand why she would want these women to die, either. I get why Josh was a target; he’s an astral projector, making his body more vulnerable to possession than your average person. But why would he get control of that body and then stick around? Why not disappear into the night and resume the killings if that is The Bride’s central motivation? The longer she sticks around, the better the chance that people who know Josh well would catch on to his odd behavior, which is precisely what happens. 

Another sticky thing is that you cannot watch this movie without watching the first film, and you have to have that first picture fresh in your mind to not get lost watching this one. That said, I don’t think this movie does enough to further develop any returning characters in a way I found interesting. The dialogue isn’t doing anyone favors, and Karl is a dud of a character to throw into the follow-up. He’s much less charismatic than Elise. Things happen that feel more concerned with moving a plot along a series of beats than unfolding a compelling ghost story. People split up when it makes no sense for them to do so. Characters are scattered everywhere; nothing is even close to being authentically scary. 

What felt extremely obvious is that Whanell & Wan immediately regretted killing Elise. Of all the elements in the first movie, she comes the closest to being the most interesting. They’ve realized the series cannot hinge on this one family, and Elise is a character that could go in and out of a variety of situations far more easily. Perhaps this is why Wan ensured the audience understood that Ed & Lorraine Warren were the central characters when The Conjuring came along. They keep trying to find ways to shoehorn her in through flashbacks or ghostly visits in the Further, but I felt they were kicking themselves for killing her off.

Patrick Wilson gets to do the most acting out of anyone on screen, and he’s fine. It’s definitely a change-up from the first movie. He’s the main antagonist, playing a killer pretending to be Josh. It’s a clever change but not executed too well. There are shades of Nicholson’s Jack Torrance, but not anywhere close to as good as that performance was. In a trend that will continue, this movie allows the Lambert family to move past these horrors pretty much unscathed, but more on that when I talk about The Red Door.

My favorite part of this film was the decision to dub over the voice of the actress playing the young Elise in the opening prologue. I read that the excuse was, “Lin Shaye has such an iconic voice.” The result is that you will be very distracted every time this woman opens her mouth. In The Last Key, which features Elise as a little girl, I was hoping so bad they dubbed her voice too, an adult Elise’s voice coming out of this child. They should at least be consistent, and you must admit that would have been hilarious.

Insidious: Chapter 2 does little to convince me why this franchise has fans who adore it. Everything I expected fell flat, and what we got felt mean (The Bride) or otherwise so muddled and lacking direction. We’re two down, three more to go,