Being a dental hygienist is a thankless job.  They diligently scrape off the gunk build-up on our teeth, fully aware that they’re going to do the same thing in six months.  Which is why I would advise that anyone interested in this career avoid Insidious: Out of the Further.  Not only is the kindly hygienist in this movie forced to clean the worst set of teeth I’ve ever seen, he has a second pair like a geriatric Zenomorph!  Maybe that Starbucks barista job would be a better option after all.

The movie begins in 1999, which shocked me because it still feels too recent to me to fall under “ancient”.  A young Gemma (Charli Penton) stands outside her house in the pouring rain, getting soaked instead of going inside.  The reason behind her hesitation is her erratic mother Ingred (Laura Gordon), who Gemma finds dozing at the dining room table.  

Gemma has dealt with this situation before.  She takes out the trash, warms up a frozen dinner and does her homework.  When Ingred awakens, she says she’ll make dinner.  Gemma says that she already ate, and mom turns away with a sad look on her face.  I’m not sure if the movie was going for this, but the dynamic between Gemma and her mom has all the earmarks of a child watching a parent waste away due to a drug habit, or specifically the opioid epidemic.

Things take a turn for the worse that night.  Ingred runs around as if she’s possessed, threatens Gemma with a knife and then kills herself in the most excruciating way possible.  If this were any other movie besides an Insidious movie, Gemma would assume that her mother had a mental breakdown.  Since it is set within the Insidious universe, we are safe to presume that a demon is behind this.  What demon and why it targeted Ingred remain open questions, for now.

Decades later, Gemma (Amelia Eve) is a dental hygienist with a single mother to Maya (Island Austin).  There’s no father in the picture, a pattern between Ingred and Gemma that the movie doesn’t bother to explain.  Gemma and Maya are pals and and live in the same home where Ingred committed suicide.  Gemma’s hunky boyfriend Nick (Brandon Perea) doesn’t understand why she would choose to live there, but Gemma says she’ll never leave the house.  One legitimate reason would be that Gemma couldn’t afford a home like that one on her salary.

Things take a creepy turn when a trio of old people start wandering the neighborhood with an oxygen tank in tow.  Genna then takes an impromptu trip into The Further, where she encounters the geezers.  Among the movie’s best set pieces is where Gemma is chased by a demon in a fort of couch cushions that stretches into infinity.  One of the ghouls comes in for a cleaning, and the scene is so disgusting that I wouldn’t recommend watching it while eating.

When Gemma is knocked unconscious and thrown into the Further, she’s saved from a horde of demons by Elise Rainer (Lin Shaye), who died in the first movie but lives on in The Further.  Elise tells Gemma to visit a tattoo artist named Clare (Maisie Richardson-Sellers), who practices on grapefruits.  You have to just go along with this part, because the two white guys in shirt sleeves who palled around with Elise in the previous movies aren’t coming back, apparently.

Through the use of a guided sleep routine, Elise is able to enter Clare’s body and communicate with Gemma.  Apparently, Clare isn’t just a traveler, but also a courier.  A deceased cult leader named Cyrus Lam (Sam Spruell) wants Gemma to take him out of The Further and back to the living, where one presumes he’ll do even worse things than when he was alive.  Also, the trio of old fogies are his acolytes, and have been wearing Gemma down so that Cyrus can use her as his gateway between worlds.

The plan is for Gemma to trap Cyrus behind a Red Door, while Nick wakes up the oldies to keep them from projecting into the Further.  And Elise will be on-hand in the Further to help out.  Of course, it won’t be as simple (!) as it sounds, because Cyrus is too “insidious” to be taken down by this ragtag team of demon hunters.

Recommendation

When Insidious: The Red Door wrapped up the story of the demonically-tormented Lambert family, there was never a doubt that there would be a sequel.  These movies are too profitable for Blumhouse to simply walk away from the franchise.  What direction would take was an open question, though.  Of the five previous installments, three were devoted to the Lamberts, while the other two were prequels devoted to amateur demonologist Elise.

It’s with the latter that Insidious: Out of the Further finds its inspiration.  If this movie’s intended as a guide for what the franchise will do moving forward, the sequels will take the form of a “demon of the week” episode.  New faces will encounter demons, venture into the Further and meet Elise, who pops-up like a supernatural Columbo to explain things.  Becoming an anthology would certainly keep things from growing stale, but is risky given that there will be no returning Unkillable Evil Being, as is the case with other horror franchises.

In terms of the movie itself, it liberally applies the earmarks of Insidious franchise, namely grotesque demons providing the jump-scares, spooky scenes set within the Further and Elise coming to the rescue. Even though those things have grown increasingly familiar, they still work on me.  I’m in the same category as those hardcore Friday the 13th or Saw fans who know exactly what’s coming and still look forward to it.

While this franchise has gone on autopilot before (see the third and fourth entries), Out of the Further avoids that trap and instead tweaks the recipe.  Unlike the previous entries, which all involved a demon using a person as a host, this demon’s plan is much bigger in scope.  What a traveler can do within the Further also gets a makeover.  Additionally, the plot wisely withholds several key pieces of information until the last act, which resulted in several surprising twists I didn’t see coming.  For the sixth go-around in this franchise, extending the lore was the right call.

Amelia Eve is an effective scream queen, but she shines in the non-scary moments.  As Gemma, she evokes Naomi Watts’ wounded soulfulness and Leslie Mann’s slyness, with a hint of Kate McKinnon’s quirky delivery.  Her dramatic acting skills made the little moments between Gemma and her daughter unexpectedly touching, and I sympathized with Gemma while witnessing her downward spiral.  Actresses are often hailed for their big performances in horror movies, but Eve’s stands out for its emphasis on texture and personality.

Incredibly, Lin Shaye’s Elise has become the hero and face of this franchise.  James Wan hit on something special when he created this shawl-wearing grandmother who takes on demons.  As far as horror movies go, Elise is both incongruous and slightly ridiculous, but Shaye sells her character with the right amount of seriousness and sincerity that I totally believe in her.  The rest of the cast is fine, but the standout is Sam Spruell’s demonic cult leader Cyrus Lam.  Marilyn Manson should sue him for copyright infringement.

I’ve been praising writer-director Jacob Chase’s underrated previous feature film Come Play for years, and it’s nice to see him get another crack at theatrical horror.  While his use of the typical ghost story elements–ominous shadows and creaky noises–is effective, what he does with the Insidious formula impressed me.  He’s not a visual stylist at James Wan’s level, but he knows how to stage a scary scene and has several in here that had me on edge.  (Couch cushion fort, anyone?)  He’s also very comfortable turning up the “ick factor”, to a point where I wouldn’t recommend eating during the movie.

The creepy beat goes on with Insidious: Out of the Further, the latest entry in the franchise that takes things in a new, episodic direction.  The movie plays the hits while tweaking them in ways that held my interest, and Amelia Eve’s performance is quite good.  Recommended.

Analysis

I’m not as well-versed in horror movies as other folks, but I can’t think of another horror movie franchise that has done what Insidious is trying to do right now.  If my suspicions are correct, future entries won’t involve an easily identifiable villain or hero, but instead tell self-contained stories that are loosely connected to the franchise by the Further, the place where demons gather together and wait for travelers to wander in.  (There’s also Elise, and I’ll get to her shortly.)

The closest comparison I can think of is the Final Destination franchise.  The Final Destination movies never had a tangible villain.  Instead, each movie involved beautiful people cheating death, only to then be killed in incredibly gruesome ways that would shock Rube Goldberg.  The selling point was the ghoulishly imaginative death scenes, all of which were set into motion by unseen forces.  This approach is unique among modern horror franchises, which are typically associated with a villain who kills people.  In Halloween, it was Michael Myers. Friday the 13th: Jason.  A Nightmare on Elmstreet: Freddy Kruger. Texas Chain Saw Massacre: Leatherface.  Saw has Jigsaw.

For the first five movies, Insidious followed that formula with the Lipstick Demon as the demonic face of the franchise.  (Some of his appearances were cameos.)  But after having been defeated in The Red Door, Mr. Lipstick is no longer a viable option moving forward.  Out of the Further offers up Cyrus Lam in his place, but he’s “killed off” in the end.  This tells me that the next Insidious film will feature another new demon tormenting a new victim.

In a nod to fans, Out of the Further does bring back Elise (Lin Shaye), the only character to appear in all six films.  She performs a similar function to Tony Todd’s William Bludworth in the Final Destination films, a familiar face that signals to fans that they’re in good hands.  And while I enjoy Shaye’s performances in these films, there’s an obvious problem with having her as the connective tissue of the franchise.

At the time when Out of the Further was released, Shaye was 82 years-old.  While I’m happy that she’s still willing and able to be in the Insidious movies, I have to wonder what the franchise will do when she’s not.  Unlike Tony Todd’s Bludworth character, Elise has played a critical role in the Insidious films, helping travelers understand what’s happening to them while she was alive, then providing assistance from within the Further after her death.  Elise has effectively been the glue character in all six Insidious films, and made the mediocre third and fourth entries watchable through her presence.

Maybe the producers plan to pass the torch in the upcoming sequel, because having the success of the franchise rest upon the shoulders of an eighty year-old actor is incredibly risky.  For reasons I’m not clear on, Out of the Further introduces tattoo artist Clare as possibly assuming that role, but then falls back on Elise doing the heavy lifting in the end.  It’s possible that the producers hedged their bets and didn’t want to upset fans by having Elise only appear in an extended cameo.  Whatever the case might be, the franchise needs someone to step into Elise’s role before they find themselves in a tough spot of selling another Insidious movie with an entirely new cast of characters.  Maybe they should give Barbara Hershey a call and pay her what she wants.

Demonic plans

One of my favorite things about these Insidious movies is how effective they are while you’re watching them, only to have them make little sense when you try to unravel the logic afterwards.

For example, Cyrus Lam has built a cult of devoted followers by promising to resurrect them after death.  The line of thinking here is that since the followers were evil while alive, they will become demons when they die.  Then, when they’re brought back to life by Lam, they would be living beings with demonic powers.

But everything hinges upon the belief that everyone involved must die in order for the pact to be fulfilled.  There’s no room for doubt in Lam’s ability to make this happen without any proof that he can actually do what he claims.  Both he and you have to die, meet up in the Further, and wait patiently while Lam finds a “courier”.  (How Lam knows about couriers and their powers is never explained, but I’m assuming that demons told him off screen.)  Lam’s plan requires a lot of faith in a guy who has only succeeded in growing his hair long and getting around despite wearing a bandage over his eyes.

Even if one buys into Lam’s plan, everything hinges upon his ability to find couriers and bending them to his will.  How does he know Ingred is a courier, or even a traveler?  How does he locate her to begin with?  How does he know what tactics will wear her down?  Lots of unanswered questions there.  If I’m a bad person looking to cheat death, I’m not sure I want to hitch my wagon to Lam.

And even if Lam manages to make everything happen as he laid it out, what do the demons do after they’re resurrected?  They’ve already died, so they can’t go back out into the world as the same people they were before.  So, where do they live?  How do they get money to buy food?  What about healthcare?  What about clothes?

In the previous five movies, the demon’s plans were much simpler.  They sought to possess the living and go around as them.  This is much simpler than coming back as your former self and not having anyone notice that you’re back from the dead.

In all fairness, there could have been more to Lam’s plan that I missed while watching the movie.  But I couldn’t help thinking when the demons were back from the dead and eating rats pulled from the walls, “Now what?”

Not so weak and helpless, eh?

One thing that Out of the Further does very well is depicting people we assume to not be threatening as exactly the opposite.

When I saw the three old geezers pulling the oxygen tank around and grinning, I figured they would play a role in the story, but only from a psychological perspective, not as physical threats.

In a change from the previous movies, this movie tells us that the living become stronger in the Further.  One old guy chases Gemma around in the couch cushion fort with the energy of a child Maya’s age.

And the old guy coming in for a teeth cleaning couldn’t possibly hurt a fly, right?  And even if he could, how would he be able to while reclined in a dentist chair?  Surprise, surprise, he has two sets of teeth!

The lesson of Out of the Further, if you want to call it that, is never assume that decrepit old people aren’t dangerous.  You never know who they’ve aligned themselves with.