Insidious: Out of the Further is directed by Jacob Chase and the cast includes Lin Shaye, Amelia Eve, Sam Spruell, Masie Richardson-Sellers, Island Austin and Brandon Perea.

TL;DR: Insidious: Out of the Further gives the franchise a new family, a new threat, and some creepy moments, but it all feels like a horror franchise location we've visited too many times.

Plot

Gemma, a young mother raising her daughter in the house she grew up in, discovers she can travel into The Further, where she possesses an ability to bring what lives there back to the real world.

It's All a Bit Too Familiar

There is something slightly depressing about realizing that I now know my way around the Further better than some of the characters do, because after six Insidious movies, that weird black-and-red world of demons, dead people and things that really should have the decency to leave everyone alone has become almost as familiar as the houses these movies keep haunting.

I do still like the idea of it, though, and that's probably why I think Insidious: Out of the Further works in places, as The Further was one of the better ideas to come out of modern studio horror when the first movie arrived in 2010, because it wasn't simply another haunted house where a ghost stood at the end of a corridor looking annoyed.

This sixth movie is directed and written by Jacob Chase, who previously made Come Play, and it moves away from the Lambert family to follow Amelia Eve's Gemma, while Brandon Perea is also along for the ride, and Lin Shaye returns as Elise Rainier, of course she is.

After five movies involving the Lamberts and their various problems with astral projection, possessions and generally having the worst luck imaginable, starting again with somebody else at least gives the series a little breathing room, but the problem is that the Further itself remains the same old Further, and that is where I started to feel the age of this franchise creeping in, again.

Amelia Eve is decent enough here as well, particularly because the movie gives her something more interesting to deal with than simply surviving a haunted house, where the idea at the center of the movie gives the Further a slightly different function, and there are moments where you can feel the filmmakers trying to find another angle on something the franchise has already squeezed pretty hard.

The trouble is that the further the movie gets into its mythology, the less interesting I find the explanations, because I don't actually need to know everything about the Further. I liked it better when it felt like somewhere you absolutely did not want to visit and probably couldn't understand even if somebody sat down with a whiteboard and spent three hours explaining it.

Now there are rules, abilities, demons, connections and increasingly elaborate explanations for how everything works, and some of that makes the movie feel like it's trying to build a supernatural universe when all I really want is for something horrible to stand behind somebody in a dark room.

That sounds simple, but simple was part of what made the original so effective.

Some Of The Horror Still Works

When Out of the Further actually stops explaining itself and gets on with being a horror movie, I had a much better time, as there are some nasty images here, and the movie isn't afraid to get a little meaner than the PG-13 label might make you expect.

I also liked the sound design, and the Insidious movies have always understood that a horrible noise at the right moment can do more work than a CGI demon running toward the camera, so there are still moments here where the sound made me uncomfortable before anything had actually happened.

The problem is that the movie sometimes seems to know exactly what works and then immediately explains it, which is like telling a joke and then stopping halfway through to explain why it was funny, and while there are also some jump scares that worked OK, by this point the franchise has been using that particular toolbox for long enough that you can also almost hear the drawer opening.

Still, I can't pretend I didn't react to some of them.

I don't think Insidious: Out of the Further is really bad though, especially for a 6th film in the franchise, it's watchable, and moving away from the Lamberts was probably the smartest decision the series could have made after The Red Door, but the Further itself has just become far too familiar.

The first Insidious, which came out in 2010 on a tiny reported budget of around $1.5 million, went on to make roughly $100 million worldwide, which is ridiculous in the best possible way, and the franchise has now made more than $740 million globally, according to Sony, so obviously somebody somewhere has noticed that people are still willing to pay money to see demons hanging around in poorly lit rooms, so I understand why we are here.

I just don't think more mythology automatically makes the mythology better, because the original movie made me uncomfortable because I didn't fully understand what I was looking at - there was something wrong about the Further, and the movie didn't need to hand me a map, but six movies later, we've effectively got the tourist information center.

That doesn't mean the place is useless, it just means I know where the bathrooms are now.

Final Thoughts

Insidious: Out of the Further is a perfectly watchable horror sequel with some good momens, a decent new lead and Lin Shaye still doing what Lin Shaye does best, but it's also same ol same ol, which is all OK I suppose for the sixth film in a franchise.