2/10 In Insidious: The Red Door, horror icon Patrick Wilson, the male lead of every mainline Insidious and Conjuring movie to date, finally brings his flaccid disinterest to the director’s chair.

The film begins with Josh Lambert (Wilson) reminiscing over video of himself taking care of Dalton Lambert (Ty Simpkins) as a baby. In the video, he offers to not change the protesting Dalton’s diaper, to just clean the shit out of it and put it back on. It’s a remarkable self-own for the fifth Insidious movie in 13 years, a franchise that feels imminently forgettable even as it reliably banks $100 million. The rest of the film packs in much more soiled diaper imagery than I was prepared for.

Insidious: The Red Door is set nine years after Josh and Dalton Lambert undergo hypnotherapy so that they, like me, have completely forgotten the prior Insidious movies. Predictably, this has led to divorce and ongoing disconnect while failing to address the problem, which is that they both astrally project into an underworld dimension called the Further when they sleep. As Dalton Lambert arrives at college, their shared repressed nightmare erupts to the surface.

The main impression I come away from Insidious: The Red Door with is how bizarre it is for a movie to have such a wonderful understanding of the interplay between art, trauma, suppressed memory and what these two characters’ pasts clawing out to the surface would look like, but for it to also be so hateful and mean and lacking in empathy toward most of its own characters. Insidious: The Red Door spends most of its energy mocking the collection of Animal House tropes it substitutes for college, from Dalton Lambert’s abusive art professor to his roommate, Chris Winslow (Sinclair Daniel), to the frat party they ironically attend together, apparently the only thing anyone is doing on campus.

I have a strong preference toward movies that are empathetic toward their characters. When movies like Insidious: The Red Door use its characters as straw men for types of people it doesn’t like and spends its energy ripping on them, I always find it slightly sad and incredibly boring. This aimless, cowardly spite that doesn’t even rise to the level of bullying because there’s no one there to punch back, I don’t understand it, I don’t know why this is the emotion anyone would choose to express with a medium as versatile as film and I don’t have time for it.

There are a lot of great examples of horrors, tragedies and comedies that are extremely empathetic toward the people they’re making jokes about. I would point at Paint, which just recently came out, and TV shows like “Scrubs” and “The Sopranos,” which are both about deeply flawed characters and draw humor from those flaws, but are rarely judgmental. Insidious: The Red Door, on the other hand, is caricatures stacked on caricatures saddled with cringey, first-draft stupid dialogue by screenwriter Scott Teems.

These Insidious movies initially grew out of the braintrust behind the Paranormal Activity series, and true to form, they’re microbudget horrors, with The Red Door actually coming in as the most expensive installment at $16 million – though the nigh-indistinguishable Conjuring series, which grew out of the same braintrust at around the same time, frequently gets up into the $30-40 million range. We like a cheap movie, and I’m writing about just about every other 2023 blockbuster that they need to cost a lot less, but we don’t like a cheap-looking movie. The Red Door looks like an understaffed and underfunded haunted house.  

The Further is mostly the same sets with a fog machine and a blue filter. These movies are all creature features, but the “creature” is always a dude in makeup. A couple of them are just a dude in a black dress and white face paint, and those are considered the really scary ones!

The biggest giveaway on The Red Door specifically is the strange absence of people. Dalton Lambert and Winslow seem to be the only residents of a dorm that ought to be teeming with other freshmen. His art class is a spacious circle of about a dozen students, and on the first day of classes, the hallway outside it is empty. Taking the Insidious series out of the Lambert household and to college is actually a terrific move – it takes him out of his support system and into a low-privacy environment where his special needs are absolutely going to come up, but is filled with strangers who may not respect them and will be endangered by them, and also a performance-focused environment where the underworld isn’t the only thing he has to worry about.

But the school seems deserted. With the frathouse scenes, we can see that they know a crush of people is necessary for some shots, but for the most part, the pressures Dalton Lambert’s new environment should be placing on him are missing in action, and it really feels like it’s because the production was just too cheap to hire extras.

I’m not sure that the Insidious/Conjuring movies started this, but they certainly popularized the deliberate lack of continuity in action/chase scenes where the ghost can appear anywhere at any time, so viewers can’t engage with the scene at all. Is the ghost getting closer, or are our heroes making progress? Usually, no one can say. I’m sure this would be very scary to be on the inside of, but to watch, it’s this boring, arbitrary sequence of loud noises. In moments of peak tension when I should be on the edge of my seat, I’m as deep back in my seat as I can be, because even assuming I’m invested in the characters, the blow-by-blow of this scene is completely arbitrary.

It’s very rare to think of an actor as a film’s defining artistic force, but Wilson has spent most of his career here at this point, and his shift to directing forces me to reconsider. He certainly draws similarly bored performances from the rest of the cast. Insidious: The Red Door is a full-circle trilogy-capper that sees its lead characters confronting years of trauma, and all its other problems would be worth it for the type of emotional payoff latent within its setup, but when Dalton Lambert, now a grown man, comes face to face with the Darth Maul-looking thing that held him prisoner for a year when he was 10, there’s no humanity to be found.

Dalton, my guy, this thing tried to kill you and steal your body when you were a child. Get mad about it! There’s clearly an impression that the dude is too tough to fight, but don’t you want to at least take a swing or two?  

Insidious: The Red Door dives somberly into some very heavy subject matter, but when it’s time for Dalton to confront the thing that has ruined his entire life as a mere memory, when it’s time for Josh to confront the father that abandoned him 40 years ago, when it’s time for our characters to be angry and raw and human, flatline. Nothing. No oxygen in the room.

I’m in a sold-out 11 p.m. Friday night showing, and the audience is a flatline, too. The guy right next to me in the front row fell asleep a couple of times. You could hear a pin drop after every one of its comedy beats, which are frequent, dry and flaccid. It is not playing at all for what should be its most enthusiastic audience.

The noted lack of enthusiasm from people in the theater watching the movie contrasts with the obvious enthusiasm from people buying tickets. Insidious: The Red Door opened to just over $33 million, knocking the upward-of $300 million Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny off the top of the box office after just one weekend. In a summer full of flops, this shitty diaper of a movie – the movie’s own comparison, not mine! – is going to come out as one of the best investments of 2023 simply because it was one of the only reasonable investments of 2023.

Leopold Knopp is a UNT graduate. If you liked this post, you can donate to Reel Entropy here. Like Reel Entropy on Facebook and reach out to me at reelentropy@gmail.com.