Insidious: Out of the Further cements a franchise tradition, of sorts. Back in 2015, Insidious: Chapter 3 introduced a new young heroine requiring the assistance of Lin Shaye’s Elise Rainier, and after two more sequels focusing on the Rainier and Lambert families, this sixth installment focuses on another fresh female protagonist in trouble with The Further. Presumably the ninth Insidious will follow suit, if the series gets that far.
Out of the Further offers some reassurance that it just might. Clearly the imperative behind its production was commercial as much as creative (after 2023’s The Red Door became Insidious’ biggest grosser), but it demonstrates that there’s still some scary fun to be had with this material. Adding some fresh blood behind the scenes seems to have helped; this is the first installment not written or directed by part of the original team. Instead, Jacob Chase of 2020’s Come Play has assumed scripting/helming duties, and while a number of the tricks and story beats he employs are necessarily familiar, he also adds a few fresh wrinkles to the narrative and, most crucially, comes up with enough strong setpieces to satisfy Insidious’ many fans.
In a film saga defined by spooky/spectral terror, one of Chase’s innovations is to go for the occasional gross-out. These are motivated by protagonist Gemma (Amelia Eve) working as a dental hygienist, and we first see her on the job cleaning a patient’s yucky food-encrusted braces. Things become even nastier when an elderly gentleman named Lester (Joseph Lopez) winds up in her chair… but that’s getting a little ahead of the plot.
Lester has previously appeared with a couple of other spooky folks, lurking outside the home Gemma shares with her young daughter Maya (Island Austin). As seen in a prologue, Gemma grew up in that same house and witnessed something terrible happening to her neglectful mother Ingrid (Laura Gordon). She remains there 20 years later, insisting that this will help remind her to be a better mom to Maya than Ingrid was to her. Gemma’s cop boyfriend Nick (Brandon Perea) quite reasonably suggests that finding someplace else to live might be better for both Gemma and Maya’s state of mind, but he has no idea at first what a good idea this is.
Gemma begins having nightmares/visions keyed to both her childhood things (the discovery of an old flashlight that’s good for sudden, scary reveals) and Maya’s. Out of the Further’s best sequence is a lengthy, frightening setpiece in which the girl’s sofa-cushion fort becomes a liminal space of horrors that could sit comfortably alongside any of the best moments in Backrooms. The door to the Further has opened for Gemma, and when she is able to communicate with Elise (Shaye, as welcome a presence as always) via psychically gifted tattoo artist Clare (Maisie Richardson-Sellers), she learns that she has a new-to-the-franchise gift. As the title suggests, she can physically bring things back to the real world from that nightmarish realm, and there’s a particularly evil presence anxious to exploit that ability.
While the fearsome sights and sounds that ensue don’t break much new ground for this film series, cinematographer David Garbett and production designer Nick Bassett (both veterans of Evil Dead Rise and Lee Cronin’s The Mummy) provide plenty of atmosphere and eerie detail. Insidious veteran Joseph Bishara contributes typically edgy and jolting music—though several of the jump-scares are more impactful for having no stingers behind them—and effectively homages John Carpenter’s The Fog score when the proceedings become particularly intense. The last third of Out of the Further piles on the shocking and unsettling developments, and although, as often happens in movies like this, it loses its grasp on the rules as it goes along, Chase orchestrates it all with gusto and visual imagination, while pushing the PG-13 rating to its absolute limit.
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Helping to keep us engaged is a sympathetic lead turn by Eve, and the palpable mother-daughter chemistry she has with Austin. Sam Spruell and Lopez (whose credits include the title role in Passenger) are as shivery and fearsome as you could want as the most prominent fiends. Out of the Further may not be a reinvention of the ICU, but it’s definitely better than one might expect from the sixth in a modern film saga.
