Patrick Wilson is one of my favourite actors working today. Whether he’s fighting underwater King Arthur, stuck with late-career Katherine Heigl, or being the face of James Wan’s post-Saw horror catalogue, the man just seems to shine no matter where he goes. As such, the prospect of him making the transition to director has certainly got me intrigued, especially within a franchise that had already launched a major directing talent in Leigh Whannell. But as I look at his debut here, I can’t help but think he would benefit from having a completely different starting point, because this doesn’t really do him any favours.
The plot, following up nine years after the conclusion of Chapter 2, puts Wilson’s Josh and his now-college-aged son Dalton (Ty Simpkins) in the same position as myself while watching it: Trying to remember what happened in the first two films. While I can’t say I have anything major against any of the films in this series, they don’t really stick out in my memory either, even after writing about three of them previously. Thankfully, this film does more than enough to keep things moving while refreshing the audience on past events, without getting too bogged down in lore or continuity.
Wilson’s direction is… fine. It sticks to the saturated colours of the series thus far, with eerie blues for the astral projection scenes and dangerous reds for the entities that lurk within The Further, but the approach to horror presentation is a bit off. The scares here operate on two levels: Out-of-focus figures lingering in the distance of shots, and loud and calamitous jump scares. No happy medium, no in-between, and certainly no major sense of atmosphere to make either extreme all that effective on their own, much less together. There’s some interesting ideas for set pieces, like a claustrophobic sequence in an MRI machine, not to mention the titular Red Door as it appears in Dalton’s charcoal drawing, but there’s a distinct impression that they aren’t being utilised to their fullest.
Then there’s the script. While Whannell has a story credit, this is the first film in the franchise not to have him as main screenwriter. Instead, that position has gone to Scott Teems, who previously muddied the waters in Halloween Kills, and completely shat the bed with the Firestarter remake. And once again, it seems like he’s going off of prompts for a horror story, but deliberately going after the least interesting aspects of those prompts. We see Dalton going off to college, so of course, we get an extensive scene set in a frat house where all of the bros are decked out in diapers and pacifiers, carrying trays of ‘diaper pudding’. It’s more Animal House than haunted house, which creates something of a tonal disaster area next to everything else going on. To say nothing of Sinclair Daniel as Chris, who deserves a medal for actually trying to do justice to the avalanche of cringe that is the attempts at comic relief she’s been given. She manages to get less laughs than the moments that are supposed to be scary.
In fairness to Teems, though, he at least seems to have cottoned on to Whannell’s more emotive style of screenwriting, as there’s a lot of family drama to sift through with this. Focusing primarily on Dalton, with Josh doing his own digging into his past and family history, this essentially serves as a re-examination of how Chapter 2 ended, re: the memory suppression. It deals with how that event, even subconsciously, affected the both of them, up to and including how difficult it is to deal with the fact that your own father tried to murder you, possessed or otherwise. Patrick Wilson, both in front of and behind the camera, clearly cares a lot for this franchise and his place within it, and there’s a definite intent to make this finale for the Lamberts’ story ring true.
However, there’s two rather hefty obstacles that keep getting in the way of such things, one in the film and one outside of it. For the call coming from inside the house, there’s a weird flightiness as far as its attitude towards trauma and one’s past actions. It brings up how we need to let go of the past and get on with our lives, then it highlights the importance of confronting said past, and then it just keeps swinging back and forth between those two while somehow avoiding the massive overlap between them. It’s the kind of indecision that I guess makes sense as far as how people approach dealing with trauma, if we even dare to attempt it in the first place, but it also leaves the film with this sense of confusion and lack of equilibrium that kind of brings into question why this was even made to begin with.
It’s just a big mass of wanting to talk about feelings without really knowing what to say about them, and hoping that the rambling will cover all the bases by sheer happenstance. I know this is the pot calling the kettle black as far as long-winded rambling goes, but at least I’m not charging cinema prices for mine.
As for the obstacle outside of the film’s sphere, I’ll put it this way: For a film about the recursive nature of familial mental illness, the fears of repeating your father’s greatest mistakes, and exploring the dangerous realms of the supernatural through personal power, it is a mere shadow of what Doctor Sleep did with those exact same concepts just a few years ago. At best, this is what Akiva Goldsman’s initial draft might’ve looked like.
Hands down, this is the weakest of the Insidious series. Its
best moments are pale imitations of what the past films had already dealt with
and done better, and its worst are so out-of-nowhere, it’s difficult to
even fathom who thought they would be a good idea to bring into this. It’s not
particularly scary, funny, or moving, and even as the latest in a franchise
well-known for relying on jump scares, it’s still not a great example of their
use. Where The Last Key, while good, showed that the franchise was beginning to run out of ideas, this only confirms that the barrel is indeed empty.
I can only hope that Patrick Wilson avoids becoming another Russell Crowe and can make a better directorial effort in the future.
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