Review of Insidious: The Red Door (2023) by Jluis_001 — 07 Jul 2023

I thought this franchise had hit rock bottom with The Last Key, but they decided to prove me wrong.

It's conflicting to see that the film that masqueraded itself as the grand culmination of this saga ends up being the most incoherent, the most banal and, above all, the least scary of them all.

Insidious: The Red Door is at heart a drama patched together with moments of horror rather than a true horror film. And most surprising of all, that approach could have worked wonders for it with a better script and a better director.

To be able to explore the aftermath of trauma for the father and son in this story had elements that could have been explored in a way that would have given a great twist to what this franchise had done in four previous films, but Insidious is Insidious and remains true to its predictable nature, and we have to settle for an assemblage of jump scares, abysmally dark sets where you can barely see **** a woefully underwhelming "final" showdown against the popular lipstick-faced demon, and an emotional catharsis that provokes nothing.

Rose Byrne only appears in a few sequences in this film and the tedium on her face in all of them reflects my own feelings.

This franchise had at hand the potential for a change, for a smooth metamorphosis that would have allowed it to reinvent itself, yet it opted for the path of least resistance, thereby surrendering to irrelevance.

Jason Blum said that after this one he would put the franchise to rest for a long time, but it seems that he forgot about the spin-off that was already announced.