Insidious: The Red Door (2023)

Insidious: The Red Door arrives as the fifth installment of a franchise that has already buried its share of bodies, and it does so with the grim efficiency of a funeral home that has stopped pretending to grieve. Patrick Wilson directs himself and a returning cast through the Further once more, this time with a father-son reconciliation at the center. The film concerns repressed memory, inherited trauma, and a red door that will not stay shut. None of this amounts to a social program. It is a haunted house with better lighting.

The supporting cast includes Sinclair Daniel and Hiam Abbass, both of whom perform capably and neither of whom is asked to carry a thesis. Their presence is welcome and unremarked upon. There is no commentary on race, no gender polemic, no environmental sermon, no economic grievance, no celebration of any body type, and no advocacy on behalf of the neurodivergent. Mental illness appears briefly as backstory, the institutionalization of Josh's father, and the film treats it as a source of family shame instead of a platform. This is a horror movie, and it knows it.

Instead we get a ghost story that wants to be about fathers and sons and mostly succeeds at being about jump scares. The film has no interest in instructing us. It has an interest in frightening us, and it manages that only intermittently, which is its own kind of failure. A sequel that neither scares nor preaches is left with the furniture of the genre: creaking doors, flickering lights, and a demon who has overstayed his welcome. The red door closes. In the post-credits scene the light flickers back on, because the franchise has bills to pay. Nothing here will offend anyone, which may be the most damning thing we can say.