Insidious: Out of the Further

Sixth Insidious. Jacob Chase (Come Play) directs from a script he wrote with David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick, the guy who's been writing Conjuring-adjacent sequels for a decade now. Amelia Eve plays Gemma, a young mom raising her daughter in the house Gemma herself grew up in. Early on she figures out she can slip into The Further, the franchise's gauzy purgatory full of lost souls. Brandon Perea and Maisie Richardson-Sellers are in there too. Lin Shaye returns as Elise Rainier, because of course she does. This one soft-resets the series off the Lambert family and plants a flag with a new one.

Amelia Eve actually commits. She's doing the mother-fear thing with real conviction, and when the camera asks her to carry a scene alone in a dim hallway she carries it. Lin Shaye at 82 is still the best thing in any Insidious movie, and her scenes have the only real texture here. Chase has a specific knack for suburban-domestic unease, carried over from Come Play, and a couple of the Further sequences have genuine composition behind them, slow pushes into fogged-out rooms that remember what James Wan was doing in 2010. The dentist setpiece is a legitimate idea, grimy and specific in a way the rest of the movie never quite matches.

It's six movies in and the Further looks like a Spirit Halloween backlot. Johnson-McGoldrick's script hits every beat you can predict from the trailer: creaking door, music box, red-faced thing in the mirror, mom-doesn't-believe-her-kid, mom-believes-her-kid. The middle act sags hard. Perea is wasted. The mythology stacking, souls that can be dragged back out of purgatory, is interesting on paper and tedious on screen because the movie keeps pausing to explain its own rulebook. By the final stretch you can feel the runtime.

If you still show up for every Blumhouse haunted-house release, if The Conjuring 2 is a comfort watch, if you like Lin Shaye doing her thing, there's enough here to chew on for 100 minutes. Anyone who found The Red Door forgettable will find this more forgettable. Horror viewers who've moved on to Longlegs, Smile 2, Weapons, the newer stuff that's actually trying something formally, will bounce by the second Further trip.

SLOP, and it earns it in craft terms. The problem isn't ambition, it's execution: a reset premise that wants to open the franchise up, delivered through staging and scares the series already used three times. Chase can frame a shot, but the pacing is baggy and the script won't commit to its own new idea, so the back half retreats to haunted-house muscle memory. No lecturing to speak of, this is a movie that wants to scare you and sell popcorn, it just doesn't scare you. The dentist bit will trend on TikTok for a weekend. By Tuesday you won't remember how it ended.