Movie Review – Insidious: The Red Door

Insidious: The Red Door (2023)
Written by Leigh Whannell and Scott Teems
Directed by Patrick Wilson

At one point (maybe still), we could have had an Insidious/Sinister crossover. I saw Sinister around the time it was initially released on DVD, and I remember really liking the vibe of the film, especially the bizarre films within the film. However, I can’t imagine a crossover would be any good. Insidious has really failed to live up to my already low expectations. Blumhouse got the old gang back together for a film that would serve as a direct sequel to Insidious: Chapter 2. This makes the Insidious chronology as follows: Insidious: Chapter 3, Insidious: The Last Key, Insidious, Insidious: Chapter 2, Insidious: The Red Door. It’s not as confusing as the Fast & Furious chronology, but it’s definitely up there.

Set nine years after the events of Chapter 2, we find Josh Lambert (Patrick Wilson) divorced from Renai (Rose Byrne) and his relationship with now college-bound Dalton (Ty Simpkins) strained. Josh can’t help but feel like something is missing from his memories, but he can’t pin it down. Meanwhile, Dalton has become interested in art, often drawing dark images from his subconscious. His roommate Chris (Sinclair Daniel) listens to Dalton, sharing how he is beginning to see dead people. She shows him a video on YouTube by Specs & Tucker explaining how astral projection works and includes Elise (Lin Shaye) talking about the Further. Of course, Dalton doesn’t remember any of these people due to the brain wipe he and his dad received.

The rest of The Red Door is the most toothless film in this franchise and one of the weakest horror movies I have ever seen. No one dies in this movie. Well, I mean, we attend the funeral of Josh’s mom, but other than that, no one dies because of the horror elements in this film. Additionally, we get no lore building on the Lipstick Demon, who is meant to be the central antagonist here. There’s some spooky ghost stuff, and then as the film hypes us for the demon, it just goes nowhere, and Dalton & Josh end up closer at the end, which means we’re supposed to be happy. This is worse than an episode of Goosebumps.

The marketing for The Red Door implied that this movie would tie up all the loose ends of the franchise, a quasi-legacy sequel that would catch us up on the Lambert family today and how they finally deal with the evil that has plagued them. We get more information on Josh’s estranged father that wasn’t worth the admission price. Otherwise, it’s just the same boring sequence: a character is in a dark room, and instead of turning on the lights, they scan the room, something pops out of the shadows, and walks past a door frame; we’re meant to be terrified. 

This time, Whannell and co-writer Scott Teems looked at Gen Z and said, “Hm, they talk a lot about trauma. Let’s make a movie where the horror is a lazy metaphor for the trauma and not even do it close to good.” They have certainly achieved that. The Further is still dull, a black room with a fog machine. The Lipstick Demon doesn’t feel present enough to serve as a metaphor for anything, and when he does pop up, I wouldn’t say anything is scary about him beyond his appearance. 

At its core, The Red Door is a film where Josh & Dalton spend the entire runtime trying to solve a mystery that everyone in the audience already knows the solution to. It feels like a picture just pandering to an audience trained to point at the screen and shout, “I know that thing.” It’s Blue’s Clues for middle school kids too scared to watch an actual horror movie. They might as well have had Wilson look directly into the camera and ask, “Do you know what’s haunting me & my son?” and then feign listening as audience members yelled out answers.

I would have liked some insight into what the last decade has been like for Renai, but Rose Byrne’s character is sidelined for most of the film until Josh needs her in the third act. We briefly see their daughter, a baby in the original and now a preteen. I don’t think she gets a single line in her solitary appearance at the funeral. Dalton’s little brother (I bet you can’t remember his name. I can’t & I just watched all these fucking movies) serves as a clunky exposition dump and shows why that actor was not made a more significant part of this franchise. Not that Simpkins is doing stellar work; he’s perfectly adequate. 

There is nothing left for this franchise to do. It’s a perfect example of why franchising something like Poltergeist is always bad. There needs to be more meat on the story’s bones to justify multiple entries. You have seen many haunted house movies if you’re an American moviegoer. Making the house a family doesn’t automatically make it a different experience. The inability of Leigh Whannell to decide if he wanted the series to be about Josh or Elise certainly didn’t help. The refusal to expand on the mythology of the Further and the demons within it took away the single thing that might have made Insidious interesting. 

With Blumhouse effectively blowing $400 million to buy the rights to The Exorcist, I expect they will continue going full bore with churning sequels to their franchises. The Nun continues as a spin-off of The Conjuring along with Annabelle. Insidious is set to have its first spin-off, Thread: An Insidious Tale. The writer of The Exorcist: Believer will make his directorial debut on this one. If Believer is as horrible as I believe it to be after reading & watching multiple reviews, I have no doubt Threads is going to be dull & lifeless, too. Blumhouse delivers something worth watching occasionally, but they are not consistent enough to warrant the box office success they have had.