Patrick Wilson’s Scares Get Distracted by Drama in Insidious: The Red Door

Insidious: The Red Door represents what’s hopefully the tail-end of the horror genre’s contemporary “Trauma Horror” infatuation. Patrick Wilson’s directorial debut wavers between being a mediocre Lambert family drama and another spooky submersion into The Further, without harmony or balance. The foundational signatures of Insidious films are present—one or two memorable scares, scratchy records, astral projection—but without the overwhelming boogeyman dread or atmospheric stranglehold. Screenwriter Scott Teems reflects on Leigh Whannell and James Wan’s Insidious franchise by showing the Lamberts after a decade’s worth of otherworldly traumatic repression, which disappointingly gets away from what’s otherwise made this series so sinisterly supernatural.
Nine years have passed since Josh (Patrick Wilson) and Dalton (Ty Simpkins) needed to undergo memory suppression after a possessed Josh attempted to murder his family. A subconscious fog blankets the traumatizing event like a sheet over antique furniture. Josh’s groggy state pushes him away from his wife and children—Dalton becomes a hidden-in-his-emo-shell art prodigy (Simpkins is all grown up as a moody and hipster-ass Dalton). It’s at college where Dalton’s instructor unlocks visions of a red door to which he struggles to ascribe meaning, as the Lamberts realize they can’t ignore their cursed past. Josh and Dalton must confront truths buried behind a firetruck-red door in The Further, which comes with perils that Renai Lambert (Rose Byrne) has tried to hide for so long.
Hauntings are familial as Josh and Dalton struggle to understand their ambiguous malaise. Not creaky floorboards or cobwebbed basements, but fathers abandoning their families and the paralysis of past traumas drive characters toward future darkness. Wilson keys into Josh’s ambivalence as a parent stuck in stagnation—the mood swings, the evaporating hope—which ends up feeling like a lesser departure compared to what earlier Insidious entries have accomplished. Wilson’s direction always feels distracted by dramatic character beats throughout the sloggy 107-minute duration, more regurgitated than rejuvenating compared to the Hereditarys or The Night Houses spearheading the Trauma Horror movement.