Insidious: The Red Door definitively buries the saga (review)

Patrick Wilson goes behind the camera for this new installment that promises a long-awaited return to basics, but ends up falling into the most notorious pitfalls of the horror genre.

Nine years after a second part as a grand finale, which was finally followed by two surprise prequels (?), the horror saga Insidious signs its big comeback with The Red Doora new sequel that chooses to ignore the last two films, in the style of the last trilogy Halloween (you follow ?). So we find the Lamberts, this beautiful little totally innocent American family, martyred without any reason by demons from an indecipherable hell. After an inaugural scene showing the burial of the grandmother (Barbara Hershey has therefore chosen not to return), we discover that the family nucleus has imploded: each of the two parents now lives on his side, just like the two sons (and a daughter, but no one seems to notice her presence) Foster and Dalton, the undisputed darling of the demons, who is returning to college.

At the end of the second part, a bit like a satanist (Wo)man in Black, the high priestess and exorcist Elise Rainier erased the memories of Dalton and his father. Thanks to a totally unexplained reason, these memories will nevertheless resurface, and both will have to save each other once again in the limbo of hell, where a new series of monsters, all more terrifying than the others. will resurface… The Red Door marks the first passage of Patrick Wilson in front of and behind the camera. Unfortunately, he signs the most heartbreaking part of the saga, taking pleasure in a weak work on the staging, which bets on the jump scares in abundance to hide its lack of ambition, far from the terrifying effects created by the shoulder camera of James Wan and his ingenious use of the depth of field, which placed each spectator on the alert in the first film. Apart from Patrick Wilson (obviously, since he’s the one who directs), everyone here seems to produce the bare minimum, starting with Ty Simpkins in the cliché of the emo teenager rejecting his father, and Rose Byrne who we encourage you instead to admire in the series Platonic on Apple TV+.

By Patrick Wilson. With Patrick Wilson, Ty Simpkins, Rose Byrne… Duration: 1h47. Released July 5, 2023.