Night of the living dad
It's odd to say of Insidious: The Red Door, no less than the fifth film in a series, "that sure seems like an unnecessary sequel", but the Insidious series has followed a crooked path. First there was Insidious, which premiered in 2010 but for all intents and purposes is a 2011 film, and it was a simple, terribly effective haunted house domestic drama about a family called the Lamberts, which has gotten the wrong kind of attention from a red-faced demon that likes the Tiny Tim recording of "Tiptoe Through the Tulips"; it's clearly the franchise peak, about which the most damning criticism one could say is that it has been pretty thoroughly overshadowed by The Conjuring. And then, in 2013, came Insidious: Chapter 2, which is simply godawful but at least it's straightforward: starting very soon after the first movie, it continues on from that film's formulaic "the end... or is it?" hook and resolves it. And that point, ten years ago, is sort of where we left off: the questionably-titled follow-up Insidious: Chapter 3, from 2015, was a prequel, one that had nothing at all to do with the Lamberts and only a little to do with their demon, and a whole lot to do with their psychic expert, Elise Rainier, played by Lin Shaye. For it had apparently occurred to the producers of the series, correctly, that it was very important to keep Shaye available, given that she was the best actor in the first two movies, and that she had spent the end of the first movie and all of the second movie playing somebody who was dead. So a prequel was the right way to go, and then it was the right way to go again in 2018 with Insidious: The Last Key, which also made the sensible choice to be done with the whole "chapter" thing.
The Last Key led pretty directly into the start of the first Insidious, but in principle there could have been as many Elise Rainier Adventures as Screen Gems, Blumhouse, and Shaye were interested in making. Nevertheless, the five-year pause in the series has led to The Red Door, which for the first time takes us to real-world chronology: it's ten years after Chapter 2, both inside of the movie and outside of it, and we are back with the Lamberts, and Elise is dead, which hasn't stopped her yet. And Shaye does, in fact, put in a cameo, but not anything more than that, and that's a bummer, to me. And this gets me back to my extremely pointless complaint: this sure seems like an unnecessary sequel. It's not a series about the Lamberts anymore, and even if it was, their story was resolved without any gaping leftover plot holes, and in a movie that sucked hard enough that I don't know why somebody would even want to risk going back to it. But here we are, with what I guess has to count as a "legacy sequel", though it feels like you need more time than this to pass in order for that term to apply.
Setting aside the question of whether or not Insidious: The Red Door needed to exist, whether the audience was clamoring for it to finally see the light of day, I can say this much: it's a godawful piece of shit. It takes the laziest of all routes, suggesting that what happened a decade ago shall happen again now in more or less exactly the same way. So, at the end of Chapter 2 (the film obligingly recaps everything from the earlier films that we need to know in unobtrusive detail, maybe the only thing that Scott Teems's script actually does well), dad Josh Lambert (Patrick Wilson) and son Dalton Lambert (Ty Simpkins) were both hypnotised in order to forget the trauma they both experienced as the psychically-sensitive prey of the Lipstack-Face Demon (Joseph Bishara), and also to forget how Josh, while he was possessed by the demon, attempted to kill every member of his family with an axe. One person who didn't forget this was Josh's wife and Dalton's mother Renai (Rose Byrne), who has proven unable to deal with being one of only two people carrying around the memory of Josh's hate-contorted face and violent rage, and so at some point in the last decade divorced him. As the film opens, Renai's status as "one of two" has become "one of one", with Josh's mother having now died, which of course puts Josh under the kind of emotional stress you don't want to be put under if some quack hypnotherapist put a band-aid over your most traumatic, dangerous memories ten years ago. Meanwhile, Dalton is heading off to college, where he will study art under the legendary Prof. Armagan (Hiam Abbass), whose main pedagogical practice, outside of humiliating her students on the first day of class, is to insist that you go deep into your mind, so deeeep, deep enough that if you have any barriers between you and your innermost secrets, barriers put up by a hypnotherapist, say, you should rip those barriers down and paint what you find there. Which is kind of cool to know that an imperious professor is all that it takes to conjure demons. Anyway, the thing Dalton finds and paints is, how about this, a red door - the same red door that serves as a barrier between the living and the hungry demons in the netherworld called The Further, where both father and son were stranded, each in his turn, ten years ago. So both Lambert men are opening themselves up to some attacks from any passing demonic presences, but with Mama Lambert dead and Renai being unwilling to talk about it, neither of them will have the first clue what to do with all of the shadowy figures and foggy blue hallways about to start showing up in their lives.
But you know what's even more of a threat than demonic possession? Emotionally unavailable dads. The very weird thing about The Red Door is that it is, at heart, a plaintive family drama about how Josh's resentment towards the dad he never knew has led him to be a very different kind of awful father to his and Renai's three kids, though fuck the two who aren't Dalton, as far as the movie is concerned. It cares about this fraught, tense relationship very much. And it cares even more about how Dalton finds his footing at college, with a wacky mix-up briefly giving him, get this, a girl roommate, Chris (Sinclair Daniel), who in her withering sarcastic quip-driven way wants him to find this time to move beyond the emotional wounds given to him by his dad. Every now and then, acting with tangible resentment every time, the film interrupts Dalton's tentative first steps into adulthood with darkly-lit scenes involving ghosts and mechanically-sound jump scares that are just completely devoid of any sort of imagination. If you have seen literally any paranormal horror movies in the 13 years since Insidious came out, you could with absolutely no effort or error count down to the exact second when the spooky thing shows up to go blargh.
I think there's room for a movie to combine sad indie drama father/son and off-to-college themes with the grotesque monster designs and suffocating gloomy netherworld typical of this franchise; I think it's weird to want to combine those, but I can imagine being at least able to do so. But I think doing that would have required an absolute wizard in the director's chair, and The Red Door instead got none other than Patrick Wilson himself, making his directorial debut. It is not, to be clear, badly directed. If Wilson makes another movie, maybe a story about a priest trying to hide his fear that God doesn't exist from his congregation, while the congregation is being butchered by a knife-wielding serial killer, I won't avoid it. He was obviously paying attention during the production of all the James Wan ghost stories he's starred in, and put the camera in the same places. But there are some downright bonkers collisions of tone going on in this movie, and it needs more than a perfectly serviceable first-time director to make it not feel like the morbid character drama is being yanked, kicking and screaming, into a boilerplate genre film.
Also, given how much the film passionately yearns to be a sincere, psychologically deep story about Josh and Dalton, two defensive, broken people who share their trauma with each other and are thus able to begin healing themselves and their relationship, it absolutely needs two very good-to-great performances. And it gets... Look, Patrick Wilson, director, understands the limits and strengths of Patrick Wilson, actor. He's not pushing himself, and that's probably for the best. It is painfully obvious in Byrne's unhappily small number of appearances that he needs a scene partner of her caliber to do anything to raise his game, but he's doing the "manfully depressed divorcée" routine well enough, if without distinction. Simpkins, though, is film-killing bad. He was a fine if undistinguished child actor in the first two film in the series, and he wasn't doing any worse than any adult cast member in the misbegotten Jurassic World, and I seem to recall Shane Black getting something very charming and winning out of him in Iron Man 3. But charting a path through adolescence has ruined him. I was willing to write off his performance in 2022's The Whale as the fault of some catastrophic screenwriting (in a film of no good character writing, he still got by far the worst part), but even though Insidious: The Red Door isn't exactly a proud triumph of the screenwriter's craft, it's still pretty easy to imagine a better performance than this one. It kicks in right at the start, when Dalton is reading from Ecclesiastes 3 at his grandmother's funeral, the "A time to X, a time to Y" verses, and Simpkins intones this passage with a lead-footed lack of affect that crushes the rhythmic poetry of the lines and turns them into a glacial trudge through endless repetition. Maybe the justification for this is that he's just so emotionally flattened that he can't feel his way into the reading, but it's not really what the scene implies, and what I took from this was that he's a sullen asshole who hates reading.
Certainly, that dead-fish approach to line deliveries is no less true of any of Simpkins' other dialogue elsewhere in the film. it become especially bad during his scenes with Daniel, where she's dealing with the excruciatingly over-written zaniness of the part by cheerfully screeching her way through everything, so basically like half of the movie is a manic leprechaun trying to get a waterlogged corpse to crack a smile. I cannot overstate how much I grew to hate the Dalton/Chris scenes, and they are so much of the movie: certainly a plurality of all the scenes. Dalton is definitely being positioned as the central character more than Josh is, and this proves utterly ruinous. Teems can't write the college material, the actors can't play it, and Wilson's by-the-books horror movie directing is simply not equipped to deal with anything that isn't going entirely well without him. The film isn't horrible when it's sticking closest to the generic "things go bump" formula of the rest of its series, though it absolutely never rises above the ceiling of "but this was done much better three times before, and two of those times I got to watch Lin Shaye doing it". The least-formulaic parts, however, are such ghastly misfires, silly and emotionally trivial where the film fervently believes that they are resonant and complex and moving, that the whole film feels like a humiliating failure across the board.
Reviews in this series
Insidious (Wan, 2010)
Insidious: Chapter 2 (Wan, 2013)
Insidious: Chapter 3 (Whannell, 2015)
Insidious: The Last Key (Robitel, 2018)
Insidious: The Red Door (Wilson, 2023)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
The Last Key led pretty directly into the start of the first Insidious, but in principle there could have been as many Elise Rainier Adventures as Screen Gems, Blumhouse, and Shaye were interested in making. Nevertheless, the five-year pause in the series has led to The Red Door, which for the first time takes us to real-world chronology: it's ten years after Chapter 2, both inside of the movie and outside of it, and we are back with the Lamberts, and Elise is dead, which hasn't stopped her yet. And Shaye does, in fact, put in a cameo, but not anything more than that, and that's a bummer, to me. And this gets me back to my extremely pointless complaint: this sure seems like an unnecessary sequel. It's not a series about the Lamberts anymore, and even if it was, their story was resolved without any gaping leftover plot holes, and in a movie that sucked hard enough that I don't know why somebody would even want to risk going back to it. But here we are, with what I guess has to count as a "legacy sequel", though it feels like you need more time than this to pass in order for that term to apply.
Setting aside the question of whether or not Insidious: The Red Door needed to exist, whether the audience was clamoring for it to finally see the light of day, I can say this much: it's a godawful piece of shit. It takes the laziest of all routes, suggesting that what happened a decade ago shall happen again now in more or less exactly the same way. So, at the end of Chapter 2 (the film obligingly recaps everything from the earlier films that we need to know in unobtrusive detail, maybe the only thing that Scott Teems's script actually does well), dad Josh Lambert (Patrick Wilson) and son Dalton Lambert (Ty Simpkins) were both hypnotised in order to forget the trauma they both experienced as the psychically-sensitive prey of the Lipstack-Face Demon (Joseph Bishara), and also to forget how Josh, while he was possessed by the demon, attempted to kill every member of his family with an axe. One person who didn't forget this was Josh's wife and Dalton's mother Renai (Rose Byrne), who has proven unable to deal with being one of only two people carrying around the memory of Josh's hate-contorted face and violent rage, and so at some point in the last decade divorced him. As the film opens, Renai's status as "one of two" has become "one of one", with Josh's mother having now died, which of course puts Josh under the kind of emotional stress you don't want to be put under if some quack hypnotherapist put a band-aid over your most traumatic, dangerous memories ten years ago. Meanwhile, Dalton is heading off to college, where he will study art under the legendary Prof. Armagan (Hiam Abbass), whose main pedagogical practice, outside of humiliating her students on the first day of class, is to insist that you go deep into your mind, so deeeep, deep enough that if you have any barriers between you and your innermost secrets, barriers put up by a hypnotherapist, say, you should rip those barriers down and paint what you find there. Which is kind of cool to know that an imperious professor is all that it takes to conjure demons. Anyway, the thing Dalton finds and paints is, how about this, a red door - the same red door that serves as a barrier between the living and the hungry demons in the netherworld called The Further, where both father and son were stranded, each in his turn, ten years ago. So both Lambert men are opening themselves up to some attacks from any passing demonic presences, but with Mama Lambert dead and Renai being unwilling to talk about it, neither of them will have the first clue what to do with all of the shadowy figures and foggy blue hallways about to start showing up in their lives.
But you know what's even more of a threat than demonic possession? Emotionally unavailable dads. The very weird thing about The Red Door is that it is, at heart, a plaintive family drama about how Josh's resentment towards the dad he never knew has led him to be a very different kind of awful father to his and Renai's three kids, though fuck the two who aren't Dalton, as far as the movie is concerned. It cares about this fraught, tense relationship very much. And it cares even more about how Dalton finds his footing at college, with a wacky mix-up briefly giving him, get this, a girl roommate, Chris (Sinclair Daniel), who in her withering sarcastic quip-driven way wants him to find this time to move beyond the emotional wounds given to him by his dad. Every now and then, acting with tangible resentment every time, the film interrupts Dalton's tentative first steps into adulthood with darkly-lit scenes involving ghosts and mechanically-sound jump scares that are just completely devoid of any sort of imagination. If you have seen literally any paranormal horror movies in the 13 years since Insidious came out, you could with absolutely no effort or error count down to the exact second when the spooky thing shows up to go blargh.
I think there's room for a movie to combine sad indie drama father/son and off-to-college themes with the grotesque monster designs and suffocating gloomy netherworld typical of this franchise; I think it's weird to want to combine those, but I can imagine being at least able to do so. But I think doing that would have required an absolute wizard in the director's chair, and The Red Door instead got none other than Patrick Wilson himself, making his directorial debut. It is not, to be clear, badly directed. If Wilson makes another movie, maybe a story about a priest trying to hide his fear that God doesn't exist from his congregation, while the congregation is being butchered by a knife-wielding serial killer, I won't avoid it. He was obviously paying attention during the production of all the James Wan ghost stories he's starred in, and put the camera in the same places. But there are some downright bonkers collisions of tone going on in this movie, and it needs more than a perfectly serviceable first-time director to make it not feel like the morbid character drama is being yanked, kicking and screaming, into a boilerplate genre film.
Also, given how much the film passionately yearns to be a sincere, psychologically deep story about Josh and Dalton, two defensive, broken people who share their trauma with each other and are thus able to begin healing themselves and their relationship, it absolutely needs two very good-to-great performances. And it gets... Look, Patrick Wilson, director, understands the limits and strengths of Patrick Wilson, actor. He's not pushing himself, and that's probably for the best. It is painfully obvious in Byrne's unhappily small number of appearances that he needs a scene partner of her caliber to do anything to raise his game, but he's doing the "manfully depressed divorcée" routine well enough, if without distinction. Simpkins, though, is film-killing bad. He was a fine if undistinguished child actor in the first two film in the series, and he wasn't doing any worse than any adult cast member in the misbegotten Jurassic World, and I seem to recall Shane Black getting something very charming and winning out of him in Iron Man 3. But charting a path through adolescence has ruined him. I was willing to write off his performance in 2022's The Whale as the fault of some catastrophic screenwriting (in a film of no good character writing, he still got by far the worst part), but even though Insidious: The Red Door isn't exactly a proud triumph of the screenwriter's craft, it's still pretty easy to imagine a better performance than this one. It kicks in right at the start, when Dalton is reading from Ecclesiastes 3 at his grandmother's funeral, the "A time to X, a time to Y" verses, and Simpkins intones this passage with a lead-footed lack of affect that crushes the rhythmic poetry of the lines and turns them into a glacial trudge through endless repetition. Maybe the justification for this is that he's just so emotionally flattened that he can't feel his way into the reading, but it's not really what the scene implies, and what I took from this was that he's a sullen asshole who hates reading.
Certainly, that dead-fish approach to line deliveries is no less true of any of Simpkins' other dialogue elsewhere in the film. it become especially bad during his scenes with Daniel, where she's dealing with the excruciatingly over-written zaniness of the part by cheerfully screeching her way through everything, so basically like half of the movie is a manic leprechaun trying to get a waterlogged corpse to crack a smile. I cannot overstate how much I grew to hate the Dalton/Chris scenes, and they are so much of the movie: certainly a plurality of all the scenes. Dalton is definitely being positioned as the central character more than Josh is, and this proves utterly ruinous. Teems can't write the college material, the actors can't play it, and Wilson's by-the-books horror movie directing is simply not equipped to deal with anything that isn't going entirely well without him. The film isn't horrible when it's sticking closest to the generic "things go bump" formula of the rest of its series, though it absolutely never rises above the ceiling of "but this was done much better three times before, and two of those times I got to watch Lin Shaye doing it". The least-formulaic parts, however, are such ghastly misfires, silly and emotionally trivial where the film fervently believes that they are resonant and complex and moving, that the whole film feels like a humiliating failure across the board.
Reviews in this series
Insidious (Wan, 2010)
Insidious: Chapter 2 (Wan, 2013)
Insidious: Chapter 3 (Whannell, 2015)
Insidious: The Last Key (Robitel, 2018)
Insidious: The Red Door (Wilson, 2023)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
