Insidious The Red Door Review – A Solid Reunion That Needed More Fleshing Out

Insidious: The Red Door seems to follow the recent trend of reunion sequels that have come about in recent years. Much like Halloween (2018), or Doctor Sleep, it brings back the original cast of the Lambert family with young Dalton, the astral projecting demon-possessed boy from the original all grown up.

It’s a cool concept for a sequel and the film does a solid job of showing how the trauma of the previous movies can affect of growing mind as the years go on. It’s a smaller-scale film compared to what’s come before which would be interesting but in execution, it’s a little underwhelming with a lack of supporting cast and villains to really flesh the film out. The end result is that it doesn’t do much of the usual haunted house thrill ride. It’s still a good horror flick overall but won’t stand out much compared to what’s been done before.

Reuniting With The Lambert Family

The Red Door is a direct sequel to the first two Insidious movies where Josh Lambert (Patrick Wilson) and his son Dalton (Ty Simpkin) have the ability to astral project their body into a hellish dimension called The Further allowing various tortured souls and malevolent demons to attempt to take their unoccupied bodies for themselves. In the final scene of Chapter 2, seeing a demon possessing Josh’s body and chasing after his family to kill them, only to be saved by his son at the last minute. The movie ends with the family, with the exception of the wife Renai (Rose Byrne) having their memory wiped to prevent them from “traveling” anymore.

This new movie takes place ten years later and the family is in a more grounded dark place. Losing their memories caused Josh to become distant from his family, leading to him and Renai getting divorced and his relationship with Dalton becoming incredibly strained. Nevertheless, he agrees to drive the young man to his new art college but as Dalton begins his painting course, his art reveals literal images of the past, The Red Door to The Further. Soon he and his father will have to confront the past and the various evil spirits that are waiting to be let loose.

I’ll start by saying you don’t necessarily need to watch the first two movies beforehand but you definitely benefit more from having seen them. Even with this film starting with a short recap of events, a big part of those first two movies was the relationship between the Lambert family, and The Red Door builds on that for the relationship between Josh and Dalton which is the crux of the new film.

Family Matters

This is the directorial debut of Patrick Wilson, who plays Josh as well as Ed Warren in James Wan’s Conjuring series, and it’s clear he wanted to make a smaller-scale but more personal story seeing father and son come together to confront the past. The film still has plenty of scares but it has less emphasis on the ghost hunting and seances with the series staple characters Specs, Tucker and even Elise relegated to little more than cameos (despite the latter appearing on the film’s cover).

This is the general strength and weakness of the movie. The more personal journey of Josh and Dalton is interesting and makes for a solid arc about the two working out their differences and learning to connect once again. It delves into more realistic topics of how trauma can separate families and the difficulty of connecting to those suffering from past events. I really like the scenes of Dalton’s painting, literally bringing his past back and how it hurts yet he feels he needs to know more.

Everything surrounding this however is a little too straightforward. There’s no big mystery to solve like in previous movies, no new lore or characters to get invested in, nor do you learn much about the existing characters. Even the father-son story, while well done is very predictable in how it plays out (we all know they love each other). By the end of the film, I just felt it was too barebones and didn’t have anything fresh to really latch on to.

The Lamberts

When looking at the characters of Insidious: The Red Door, I have to give Patrick Wilson credit, since he really knows how to direct himself. This may be the strongest performance he’s given in the Insidious series as Josh Lambert.

While the first two movies had Josh as the stern father figure turned possessed madman, here you see the broken man behind that. With the revelation that he’s divorced, his mothers died, and estranged from his sons, you see Josh far more vulnerable, guilt-ridden from neglecting his family, and scared of the past that haunts them, all of which Wilson pulls off in a convincing manner. You really just wanna give the guy a hug at some points.

The now 21-year-old Ty Simpkin also returns as Dalton, and his acting has gotten better with age. He starts off a bit cliched, a sulky teenager that hates his dad, but like Josh, you do see a better side of him as an awkward kid trying to work through his trauma. Who can understand the fear and isolation he’s going through and plays well off Wilson as well as his new college friend Chris (Sinclair Daniel)?

Outside of these two characters, however, the rest of the small cast are little more than bit roles. Rose Byrne gets one great scene as Renai, exploring a little of what she’s had to go through keeping the secret of the past movies but other than that not much time is given to her. Again, it’s a more personal movie to Josh and Daniel but you can’t help but well there were more areas that could have been explored with the rest of the cast.

Behind The Red Door

I should note that none of this takes away from the scares. It’s very much a faithful Insidious movie in that regard with a number of well-portrayed ghouls and demons that are lively and frightening. I especially like the cinematography which makes great use of low lighting to give each scene a shadowy malevolent feel, like a creature could pop out at any moment.

The movie also brings back the Red Devil, for better and for worse. Like in the original, the movie has the smart idea of not showing him often, just with the occasional shot here and there allowing the viewer’s imagination to fill in the gap and making him scarier. It was also really cool seeing his base in The Further, complete with the same jazz music.

I do think however that the movie might have done this too well however as, like a lot of the movie, the Devil doesn’t really do much. He’s still haunting Dalton, and he attacks a few people, but you never learn anything new about what exactly he is or see more of what he can do. When you reintroduce a fan-favorite character, I feel like you need to do something new with them, and the movie just seems to retread the same beats they did with him in the first.

Also, it goes without saying for an Insidious film but there are a lot of jumpscares. I’m not gonna act like all jumpscares are bad, in fact, many of them had some great chilling build up but there were definitely a couple that were a bit on the cheap side.

The Red Door

Insidious: The Red Door has some great ideas. Returning to the original cast with the kids grown up was a cool concept and the acting and relationship between Josh and Dalton as father and son was well done and felt genuine from both actors.

That being said everything around that relationship felt a little lukewarm. You see little from the rest of the cast, and the villains are little more than obstacles to run away from. Neither is done terribly but the movie just doesn’t do enough to differentiate itself from the standard haunted house formula.

If you’re just here for that formula and just to see the scares then it’ll serve you well, the Insidious tone of pitch-black rooms and spooky string music is here in full force and can be frightening at times but I can’t help but feel that these aspects are present in better movies like the first Insidious and the Conjuring movies. Overall, The Red Door is serviceable but I doubt the film will be haunting your mind much once the credits roll.

Insidious: The Red Door is now screening in cinemas across Malaysia.

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