It wouldn’t be the start of the spring/summer movie season without a few horror offerings slipping into the weekend box office lineup, and until Scream 4 hits – we’ve got Insidious to hold us over. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t the greatest horror movie ever told (far from it), but it is spooky, uncomfortably eerie at times and has a very original concept at its core.
Insidious follows the five members of the Lambert family. The elder Josh (Patrick Wilson – Lakeview terrace) is your average elementary school teacher. His wife, Renai (Rose Byrne – Get Him To The Greek), is a stay at home mom to their newborn and two children Dalton & Foster. Nestled in a middle American town that even middle America had forgotten, their lives shift when one of their sons Foster, falls prey to a mysterious coma. Convinced that evil spirits must be in the home, they frantically move to a new one and sadly find that what they’re running from has never been very far from them. Turns out, their comatose son is ‘body dead’ but spirit alive and lost in a limbo like plane of existence called ‘The Further.’ This realm is filled with murderous spirits long dead who want a way back into our world, and the only way they can do that is by inhabiting a living human body whose spirit is missing. Making matters worse, there’s more than one tortured damned soul that wants his body on a full time basis. And buried in the deepest darkest corners of The Further lies an overlord dark demonic creature who wants his body more than anything and for a very sinister reason.
I really enjoyed this one and I’ll tell you why, it was the storyline concept and the execution of ‘The Further’ on screen. No spoilers here (at least not really bad ones), but the storyline is at least plausible (as far as horror movies go), and the makeup of the spirit realm is so spooky. Picture what you would think the damned afterlife landscape would be and keep in mind, there’s no electricity, so no light. I was spooked. Director James Wan (Saw) brings back that same magic that made the original ‘Saw’ such a great film. Eerie in its’ humanity, not in gore.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the appearance of Barbara Hershey (Beaches) as Josh’s mother Lorraine. Known for much better roles than her horror fodder, believe it or not, it’s an early horror flick from her past that I instantly recall her to – 1982’s ‘The Entity.’ It was pre-‘Poltergeist’ and dealt with a woman demonically possessed by an entity that wanted her. I was so happy to see her resurrected in a horror capacity, and like her previous effort – she didn’t disappoint. From the moment she appeared, I knew her role wasn’t as simple as a doting mother – it gave me hope and if you saw The Entity, you know what I’m talking about.
This isn’t classic ‘Poltergeist’ or even the ‘Halloween’ series, but for lovers of the genre, its definitely an enjoyable time.
4 Stars out of Five.
Insidious is rated PG-13 for thematic material, violence, terror and frightening images, and brief strong language. Running Time: 102 minutes
I’m in it (I play the “whistling dead dad” sitting on the couch with my daughter reading a paper in the Further scene with Patrick).
I agree with your review and thank you for it.
Interesting. Might have to check it out now. Couldn’t really tell what was going on with the movie based on the commercials. Thanks for the review, Rock.
I liked a number of things in this movie. It was certainly scary in parts. But Josh’s behaviour inside the “Further” lacked credibility. In spite of being warned, he seems to go out of his way to draw attention to himself and indicating that he does not belong there.
He actually keeps calling out Dalton’s name and asking every passing creature, “hey, have you seen my son Dalton”. How retarded is that? These creatures would gladly rush into these people’s bodies if they knew the bodies were “unoccupied”; and Josh was practically telling them, “hey, I’ve left my body unoccupied, and so has my son–who is called Dalton, by the way–so, feel free to go and help yourselves to our bodies while we are still out here”.
He engages in more foolishness on reaching home. Instead of keeping his head down and rushing back into his body, he dawdles around the corridors of his home, taking time to tell the old woman’s image in the mirror sternly to stay away from them. And guess what? While he-man Josh is busy wasting super-precious time giving his he-man talk to an image in the mirror, the old woman has the last laugh by taking over his body. Surely the directors could have come up with a more imaginative and more credible way to delay Josh without making him behave like a retard? Somehow I feel shortchanged by these exhibits of poor imagination on the part of movie producers.
Interesting movie; and quite scary at several places. However, I didn’t get one thing: Dalton’s body has been “empty” for several months, and his spirit is far away from the body, lost somewhere in the “Further”, yet no “creature” has been able to “occupy” Dalton’s body after all this time. But strangely, his dad Josh’s spirit is away for how long–A couple of hours at most, right?–and has even returned home and is just metres away from his body, yet these creatures are able to take over HIS body. This contradicts the psychic’s initial explanations about the events.