REVIEW #301 Insidious: The Red Door (2023)

Set 9 years after the events of the second movie, Dalton is heading off to college, however is college dream is cut short when Josh and Dalton are haunted once again by the demons they thought they forgot. 

The latest instalment in the franchise feels far from an insidious movie, focusing on the emotional core of the lead characters instead of providing the usual haunting tropes that made the first two films incredibly popular. The central plot revolves around broken father and son relationships, which was a strange direction to say the least. It’s not that this emotional core didn’t necessarily work, it just felt really out of place and sidelined the horror that audiences had expected to see. Apart from a couple of easy jump scares, The Red Door wasn’t scary in the slightest. I can’t help but think that the writers and producers witnessed the success of projects like stranger things and IT and perhaps thought that they could create a horror inspired adventure too. It’s safe to say, this wasn’t the case, instead we ended up with a movie that couldn’t decide which genre it wanted to set itself in.

I expected the Red demon to be the big bad antagonist that had returned once again and although he was in a way, it was for a total of about 10 minutes! I thought he would play a much larger part in the movie and as a result it felt like the stakes were never really that high. There was no tense build up like the other films found success with and that left me feeling like nothing of note really happened. Did it bring the Lambert saga to a happy conclusion? Yeah kind of, but the cameo at the end was a bit of a confusing one considering they were meant to have shut out ‘the further’ forever. So I do think that the film is perfectly watchable, it was good to see the characters again but it just lacked horror and considering the insidious franchise was one of the big names in the horror industry, that was very disappointing. 

Overall (5/10)

Thanks for reading.

Callan


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