Insidious: The Red Door Parent Guide

Unable to cope with their experiences in Insidious: Chapter Two, Josh (Patrick Wilson) and his son, Dalton (Ty Simpkins) saw a hypnotist who suppressed their memories of the entire year. As far as the family is concerned, Dalton just had viral meningitis and spent the year in a coma. But ten years later, the consequences of erasing an entire year from one’s memory are impossible to ignore.

Josh hasn’t been able to focus on much of anything, and his faltering ability to parent effectively led to a divorce. Dalton, now 18, is off to college, where an art professor instructs him to create something from his deep subconscious – and he does. Dalton produces a painting of an ominous red door that seems oddly familiar…and dangerously compelling. Even his roommate, Chris (Sinclair Daniel), finds the picture a little eerie. Unfortunately for Dalton, Josh, and just about everybody else in the vicinity, a painting of this particular door is more than enough to allow it to open, and whatever is on the other side sure wants to get out. Lacking their memories of the Further, and separated by years of resentment following the divorce, Josh and Dalton have to figure out how they spent that missing year, and the sooner the better: Whatever is coming through the door is getting more and more dangerous.

I’ve only fallen asleep in theaters once, but Insidious: The Red Door caught me dozing off. Twice. On two separate occasions at different points in the film, the absence of anything happening on screen led to about a five second snooze. I wish I hadn’t woken up ‘til the movie was over, but I suppose since I was there in a professional capacity, it’s best I didn’t. This tedious film is a two-hour trawl through the muddy bottom of lazy, clichéd, and downright dull horror movie tropes, and it turns up nothing but muck.

Characters blandly stare into the middle distance for weird amounts of time, the dialogue will make you wish you didn’t speak English, and the acting is almost universally dreadful. Most damning for a horror movie, I’ve had scarier experiences riding the bus through the suburbs. In the interests of honesty, that may not be a universal opinion. That being said, for some reason, someone in the showing I attended brought their four-year-old, and he was handling the movie a lot better than the rowdy teenagers in the back, some of whom were practically crying at varying points in the story.

If you’ve ever seen any of the Insidious movies before, you will be able to unerringly predict all the scares. These films may be profitable, but they’re also painfully formulaic. There aren’t many content issues here aside from the carefully calibrated violence – the film is PG-13, after all – but a relatively low level of problematic content hardly qualifies as an endorsement. I can think of worse ways to spend the price of a movie ticket, but none spring readily to mind. If you think of any, try doing that instead. It may be disappointing, but it will probably still be better than this.