{Movie Review} Insidious: The Red Door (2023)

“We need to remember, even the things that hurt.”

It is difficult to assess Insidious: The Red Door on its own merits when it is both the fifth installment of a decade-long franchise and the latest in a sea of movies about sad dad feels, which is apparently the dominant theme of the 21st century so far, at least if movies are to be believed.

It is also difficult to judge The Red Door for what it is rather than for what I want it to be. After a five-year gap since the last installment, and a full decade since we last checked in with the Lambert family, I was promised a return to form. Patrick Wilson was back, this time both in front of and behind the camera, for his directorial debut, and more importantly, the Lipstick Demon, absent from the series since the first movie, was to make its triumphant reappearance.

To be clear, I love the original Insidious, while the rest of the franchise has been a sequence of gradually diminishing returns. In a recent episode of the Horror Pod Class, I discussed some of why this is, and lamented the fact that audience reaction to the bizarro last act of the first film meant nearly a decade of more sedate stuff from James Wan and both the Insidious and Conjuring franchises. I had hoped that, with so much fire from the original film coming back, we would get more of the spirit of the first Insidious in this (ostensibly) final one.

No such luck.

Now, is that truly a mark against Insidious: The Red Door, which never makes any attempt at all to go anywhere near where the first film did? Or is it simply that what I wanted the movie to be and what it wanted to be are two very different things?

So, if The Red Door is not the return to form that I was hoping for, what is it instead? James Wan once called the original Insidious an adult drama thrown into a haunted house. If that was true there, then it’s doubly true here. I didn’t have a stopwatch out during my screening or anything, but I would say that this newest installment spends fewer minutes of its running time on ghosts and demons than any previous movie in the series. Which, given that it is (narrowly) the longest one of the bunch, is saying something.

It has become something of a cliché when discussing horror flicks in the era of A24 and “elevated horror,” but this is a movie about trauma. It is a movie about sad dad feels, about how families grow apart, and about why it is important to seek medical help and/or therapy if you’re having problems, rather than just “trying to push through.”

None of this is particularly unusual for horror movies these days, and it is an interesting approach to the material to see all of these themes channeled through the prism of the events of the first two films – specifically, the idea that blocking out their memories of past trauma fucked up both Patrick Wilson’s Josh and his son Dalton (Ty Simpkins) more than leaving the memories alone would have.

This is where the film’s interest lies, not in the Further or the other side of the titular Red Door. There are really only a few set-piece scares in this latest Insidious, and the only one that particularly stands out is one involving an MRI machine that you may have already seen as part of the film’s marketing campaign. Even when the Lipstick Demon finally gets inside Dalton’s body – a moment that should feel truly epic after a five-film buildup – it doesn’t really do anything.

Ultimately, that’s where most of the disappointment that I felt walking out of Insidious: The Red Door comes from. I wanted something with the spook show inventiveness of the first film, and I got a mopey family drama with some occasional ghosts. Perhaps more to the point, I wanted something that would engage with the mythology that the original built – mythology that has been largely ignored by subsequent installments – and instead I got something that used that mythology as window dressing to tell a story that is, perhaps, personal and sentimental, but not anything new.

If The Red Door were unshackled from the expectations aroused by being a return to a franchise starter that I loved, it would probably be a perfectly serviceable spooker with an unusually sedate pace, solid direction from first-timer Wilson, and some good performances. But if there’s one thing that the movie makes abundantly clear, we can’t ever be free of our past if we don’t remember it, and remembering the original Insidious can’t help but make Red Door seem pale by comparison.