Insidious: Out of the Further Delivers Real Scares and Stands on Its Own

Insidious: Out of the Further genuinely surprised me. After so many films in this franchise, I had grown a little numb to the scares, and I stopped getting very jumpy after around the second movie.

This entry doesn't demand knowledge of the rest of the franchise

What also intrigued me about this movie is that it doesn't seem to be super connected to the other Insidious films beyond being set in the same universe. It's connected, but it also stands alone. I feel like that could be enticing for a lot of people who don't want to invest in the previous films before jumping in.

You can actually go into this one not knowing much about Insidious itself and still have a really good time with this movie.

The opening act builds tension the way I want from a horror movie

The opening, maybe the first half or the first act, was actually quite scary. I liked all the jump scares and the camera angles and the way the film was building tension. It was doing everything I want in a horror movie.

The story follows the young mother at the center of the film, and we see her as a child in the house where this all begins. Without too much explanation, the movie shrouds us in mystery about what is happening to her mother. She seems to be almost afraid of her, but it isn't that her mother is being mean to her. There is just something a little off. Her mother seems extremely exhausted and loses track of time, and she has to become really independent and self-reliant knowing something is wrong. Eventually, she witnesses something really terrible.

Grown up, a dentist, and still living in the same childhood home

Fast forward and she grows up and has a child of her own, but she has not moved out of her childhood home. It was left to her, so in a way it is the thing that still connects her to her childhood and to the mother she didn't want to let go of.

For me, I feel like I would have been like, "You know what? I'm done with this house. Sell it, put it away. You know, I'll take the stuff and keep the memories here." But she chose to stay in the same house.

She is also a dentist, and that plays into the film because it uses a lot of scare tactics tied to dentistry, from the more gross stuff to the sheer dread of drills in someone's mouth, with the ghosts working into that. It makes for a genuinely intense moment in the film.

Three odd figures outside her home, and losing track of time again

She starts to notice three really odd looking older individuals hanging around outside her home and walking around her neighborhood. She isn't sure what is happening, and she also starts experiencing moments where she can't tell whether she's in a dream or not, losing track of time the same way her mother did.

It's almost a recurring event of what she went through as a child, except now she is the mom, and she is sort of repeating, almost emulating, what her mother went through. She realizes she may be in some trouble, and rather than resist it, she fully embraces it, thinking something close to: "Okay, I think this is what's happening. It's what I've seen before happening with my mother. I've got to get to the bottom of this because I have a daughter to take care of. The same thing cannot happen to me."

Nobody denies her, and that's what I appreciated most

What I appreciate so much about this movie is that when she makes her concern known, there isn't a moment of the people close to her saying, "No, you're just tired, you just need a vacation." The people around her choose to believe her.

The movie also does a really good job of showing the outside perspective, the people who aren't her witnessing something themselves and reacting with something like "Oh my god." I love that we saw that right away, because it lets the story get straight into how she is connected to her mother's experience and to the further.

I say that because so often in these stories we spend a lot of time on friends or family denying what the person experiencing it is going through, calling them crazy or just tired, wasting time arguing back and forth before finally admitting near the end that the person was right all along. This movie doesn't do that. It gets right to the point, which I love.

The film's villain masterminds the escape, and one scare stood out above the rest

The big bad of this movie is masterminding how the dark entities can break out of the further, using her essentially as an entryway in and out. When you first see him, you think he looks pretty intense, with a blindfold and long dark hair.

As the movie went on and revealed more about him, I started to like the character design less and less, and once we learn his origin, I kind of went, well, that tracks. Compared to all the other entities we've seen in this franchise before, I feel like he's the most basic looking of them, although he is still pretty intense.

There was one particular scare I won't fully describe, involving someone hiding in a closet from him with something in their lap, and when they look up, whatever was in their lap is now outside. That was probably my favorite scare in the movie. The whole theater erupted in cheers and claps because it was that good. I was impressed.

Lin Shaye returns as the connective tissue to the franchise

I feel like you can't have Insidious without Lin Shaye, and she is definitely present in this movie. I love having her as part of it, serving as the connective tissue, almost as if you need it, to remind you this is part of Insidious. She's the through line that has had a part in every Insidious film.

My verdict: a pleasant surprise that loses some steam, matinee rating

Overall, Insidious: Out of the Further surprised me, and I had a genuine good time with it. I do feel like it lost steam in the middle, dragging just a little, though not too badly. I feel like the film didn't over explain everything, and it didn't under explain everything either.

Some things do happen out of convenience, which I think happens a lot in horror films. I found myself asking why something happened, only to accept that we were getting to the end and things were being wrapped up. You can either buy into that or resist it, and for me it lessened the impact of the final act a little, but only by a little.

This is a pleasant surprise in the Insidious franchise, the latest entry into the series, and I enjoyed it. I'm giving Insidious: Out of the Further a matinee rating. I could say streaming, I really could, but I feel like horror movies are the most fun to experience in a theater with an audience, and that's why I landed on matinee.

Would you rather catch this one in a theater with a crowd, or wait for it to hit streaming?