If you find yourself tensing up uncontrollably at the mere suggestion of a visit to the dentist’s office or you immediately react with repulsion at the sight of oldsters enjoying their afternoon constitutional, then congratulations. The producing duo of genre specialists James Wan and Jason Blumhouse, plus writer-director Jacob Chase have made the film for you to avoid and/or flee if you’re brave enough to indulge your phobias.
If, however, you only have a mild-to-moderate aversion to dentistry and to the oldsters among us who’ve paid their fair share to enjoy a semi-comfortable retirement, then Insidious: Out of the Further might just bore you with its familiarity. Aside from a few densely suspenseful set pieces, this horror film offers another trauma-driven storyline filled with unhealthy looking ghosts, ghouls, and demons.
Either way, Insidious: Out of the Further again centres on a family brought low by generational trauma. Like their predecessors, they’re attempting to escape the clutches of relentlessly tiresome supernatural beings and enjoy what passes for normal lives. No such luck, alas, as a prologue set in 1999 informs us of the new protagonist’s backstory: Gemma (Charli Penton), a semi-abandoned, not quite feral preteen, arrives home to find her mother, Ingrid (Laura Gordon), passed out on the dinner table. Supper, though, is nowhere to be seen, leaving poor Gemma to make the meal for herself. When it’s done, she quietly climbs the stairs to her room where she can complete the next day’s homework out of her mother’s sight or hearing radius.
Not so fast, of course, as Ingrid isn’t really passed out, at least not fully. She’s borderline incomprehensible, looking like someone who spends too much of her waking and dreaming lives with hungry ghosts. It’s meant to be a metaphor for mental illness, but ghosts or potential afflictions aside, it doesn’t end well for Ingrid, who leaves this mortal plane for the next. The same goes for Gemma, who carries her mother’s inexplicable demise with her like an invisible backpack loaded with 50lb weights.
Apparently repeating her mother’s patterns, a thirty-something Gemma (Amelia Eve, The Haunting of Bly Manor ) continues to live in her childhood home, has a preteen daughter of her own, Maya (Island Austin), and suffers from terrible nightmares. Except they’re not nightmares per se. When Gemma nods off, she enters the Further, the purgatorial realm where the aforementioned evil spirits spend eternity, presumably waiting for wayward souls to torture or finding a way back onto the mortal plane.
Despite her worsening nightmares, Gemma stubbornly refuses to seek psychiatric or psychological help. She depends primarily on the morality boosts from her longtime boyfriend, Nick (Brandon Perea), the town’s only law enforcement officer. She also supports herself full-time as a dental hygienist at Second Smile’s downtown office. It’s there that Gemma encounters one of her new neighbours, a decrepit old man with a gnarly mole under his nose and a rotting set of chompers. Even for the strong-of-stomach Gemma, just looking into his bacteria- and plaque-filled mouth sends her into shock. Moments later, she slips, falls, and hits her head en route into the Further.
After finally discovering that she’s a so-called “Traveller” who can move between our world and the Further on demand, Gemma learns she’s something even rarer: a “Courier” who can bring objects to and from the Further. That rare ability draws Gemma to the attention of Cyrus (Sam Spruell), a Further-dwelling cult leader eager to bring himself and his followers back into the world of the living where they’ll wreak all kinds of havoc and chaos.
Another routine, by-the-numbers entry in the Insidious franchise (the sixth overall), Out of the Furthe r rarely strays from its comfort zone in. The already mentioned dental visit gone horribly wrong stands out, in large part for its rarity, as does Gemma’s encounter with a pillow fort that’s significantly larger on the inside than it is on the outside. The latter’s welcome dip into liminal horror, however, doesn’t last. Before long, we’re back on well-trodden ground, with Gemma, aided by a clairvoyant, Claire (Maisie Richardson-Sellers), in the “real” world. Series veteran Elise Rainier (Lin Shaye) also appears in the Further, improving a plan on the fly to stop Cyrus and his minions.
Unfolding in lugubrious, deliberately under-lit scenes typical of the genre — and this supernatural series in particular — audience members will be fighting two distinct battles as Insidious: Out of the Further heads into its homestretch: Trying to keep alert and suppressing the increasingly unavoidable desire to check the time and find out how close they are to the exits.
