Insidious: The Red Door review: Patrick Wilson fails to deliver fresh scares

After seeing Insidious: The Red Door, it’s hard not to feel a bit sorry for Patrick Wilson. It would be an unenviable task for anyone to take the directorial reins of a franchise from modern horror legends James Wan and Leigh Whannell—much less make it his directorial debut—but The Red Door is such a wrong-headed attempt to keep the Insidious franchise alive that it almost feels like a meandering fan fiction past its prime. Featuring a co-story credit from Whannell, the screenplay by Scott Teems (Halloween Kills) is a weak re-interpretation of the Lambert family’s struggles as bland trauma horror, and Wilson’s baseline competence as a director does nothing to elevate the material.

Set nine years after the events of Chapter 2, The Red Door finds Josh Lambert (Wilson) and his now adult son Dalton (Ty Simpkins) in a coolly antagonistic relationship for which neither can fully identify the cause. As Dalton starts a new life in college as a burgeoning artist, he accidentally uncovers repressed memories of a red door, which he starts to paint in further detail as haunting ghostly visitations make him question his sanity. Meanwhile, Josh undergoes a parallel journey through his failing memory, confronting buried traumas that break the barriers between the living and the dead.

Insidious fans should already be aware of the experiences that underpin Josh and Dalton’s spiritual reawakening and the treatment they underwent to suppress their memories and their astral projecting abilities, so it’s an odd choice to develop a plot entirely around these characters discovering something the audience already knows. Until now, each chapter of this series was a paranormal investigation that gradually expanded the franchise’s mythology with a streak of self-aware deprecation. The Red Door feels content to retread the same iconography with the same demonic antagonist; it’s superficially reverent to its forebears but it fails to contribute anything worthwhile or new to its canon.

Instead, the film is intent on pretending to explore that all-consuming bugbear of modern horror; generational trauma. It would be one thing to take the franchise in an inspired new direction, but the conflation of the Lambert family’s psychic gifts with the ways in which mentally ill family members hurt one another has become such a tired trope in the possession horror subgenre that the dead horse is not only beaten to a pulp, its spirit can’t be bothered for an intimidating neigh. The Red Door makes a vague gesture in the direction of emotional resonance, but it can’t figure out what to do with its allegory beyond what’s been done before and more successfully elsewhere, flimsily mimicking Ari Aster with all the conviction of Neil LaBute.

This would be less of an issue if The Red Door had much to offer in terms of scares, but the concept and execution are lacking. Wilson is a solid enough director in terms of provoking dramatic performances from his actors, including himself, since he has a grasp of the emotional core of this story, as trite as it is. He also adds glimmers of the franchise’s trademark humor in Sinclair Daniel’s portrayal of Dalton’s dormmate Chris, making her a welcome successor to Whannel and Angus Simpson’s oddball paranormal investigators, even if the screenplay has a weird fixation on mocking frat bros.

But it’s hard to gauge Wilson’s strengths as a horror director when the scare scenes are as surprising and eerie as a haunted house you’ve already walked through a dozen times. There’s limited tension to be mined from hiding under a bed from a vomiting ghost, or from fuzzily approaching figures in the background, and the film’s most interesting scenario, a malfunctioning MRI machine, becomes a limp distraction at best. Insidious is a franchise that has thus far been consistently scary, but visceral frights have little more than a token presence here, putting the movie on pause to fill a jump scare quota.

Even so, it would be a shame if this was the end of Patrick Wilson’s directorial efforts, as Insidious: The Red Door is not a broken movie by any means. It’s a comprehensible experience, though perhaps less so if viewed as a standalone feature instead of the presumably final chapter of a continuing narrative. But Wilson was tasked with telling a pretty dull story, both in terms of its visceral horrors and its thematic ambitions. We already have Hereditary. There’s no reason to staple Insidious’ Red-Faced Demon to it and pretend it’s something new.

Insidious: The Red Door opens in theaters July 7