‘Insidious: Out of the Further’ Review: Time to Kill This Franchise?

Un-scary and uninspired, the creaky sixth entry in the “Insidious” series will make you want to send this franchise to the realm of the dead. The permanently dead. The best thing I can say for Jacob Chase’s crack at Blumhouse-Atomic Monster lore titled “Insidious: Out of the Further,” another soporific retread of the horror movie as grief metaphor, is that it doesn’t require you to do any homework.

This fifth sequel to 2011’s James Wan-directed “Insidious,” perennially viral because of its Darth Maul-like poster child known as the Lipstick-Faced Demon, jumpstarts the franchise’s backstory with new characters and grindingly by-the-numbers obstacles. Take a nap, look at your phone, order another bev, because endless exposition requires scarce attention. Personally, I’ve come and gone from the series about the collision of a purgatorial spirit world with our mortal one, which has proven sizably profitable for Blumhouse relative to its budgets despite patchy receipts from critics.

Here, British actress Amelia Eve (“The Haunting of Bly Manor“) stars as a what-else-but traumatized dental hygienist who is being stalked by the otherworldly ghouls of the Further — a kind of limbo holding cell where demons and restless ghosts convene — due to her apparent psychic ability to traffic objects and beings from one plane to the other.

Despite a coughed-up effort at mythology refresh to hopefully welcome newer audiences into the franchise’s long-running fray, “Insidious: Out of the Further” winds up another gumbo of cliches and tropes drowned in overexplanation: astral planes, material planes, mothers and daughters, cross-generational trauma, white facepowder, hypnotism, mediums, sunken places, hags, red doors, gravelly distorted voices, peeled fingernails, more hags, rictus grins, old people, grief, and mercilessly constant jump scares. Chase seems more fascinated by extreme close-ups of toweringly bad gingivitis and gooey-sticky plaque formations on dental implants than by narrative ingenuity, especially when one of Gemma’s (Eve) patients at the Second Smile clinic happens to be a ghastly dispatch from the Further itself.

This sixth entry indeed takes us further into the Further, where a limp-haired Marilyn Manson-type entity called Cyrus Lam has its eyes on Gemma in the present day. But the movie begins in Pittsburgh, 1999, when young latchkey kid Gemma (Charli Penton) arrives home from school to her emotional absentee mother Ingrid (Laura Gordon). Visible signs of body-hijacking mental illness drive Ingrid to a grisly suicide in the bathroom that her daughter is forced to witness.

A quarter of a century later — but only a few weeks after the events of 2023’s Patrick Wilson-starring “Insidious: The Red Door,” as we’ll later learn courtesy of a certain loony clairvoyant — and single-mom Gemma has a nine-year-old daughter of her own, Maya (Island Austin). She’s also got a superhot copy boyfriend (“Nope” breakout Brandon Perea) whom Gemma keeps at a remove, uneasy and unready to welcome a new man into Maya’s life. (It’s heavily implied the small girl never knew her father; same went for the young Gemma.)

Increasingly, ominous presentiments start to appear before Gemma, like a visibly dead-looking old-timey family of three with mirthlessly toothy grins pasted across their pallid faces, jarringly out of place in a contemporary suburb but observed mostly with a “huh.” Or a flashlight Gemma hasn’t seen since she was a little girl. Or a spiked talisman that could prove a conduit between our world and the land of the Further. One nifty sequence in a movie almost perversely lacking in them: Gemma crawls into one of Maya’s world-famous pillow forts, only to end up contorting herself through a liminal space of endless couch cushions to evade a Further-sent elderly demon. But does this sequence only work because it harks back to the very recent chills and thrills of Kane Parsons’ empty-spaces-as-existential-horror movie “Backrooms“?

Whatever’s going on, a sleepless, nerve-fried Gemma surmises through ramblings that concern her boyfriend that it has something to do with her mother. Someone who might have the answers is fan-favorite franchise staple Elise (Lin Shaye), a medium who commutes between both worlds, here via the body of a tattoo artist (Maisie Richardson-Sellers) endowed with paranormal gifts. Gemma’s ability to teleport objects from the Material Plane to the Further — such as a burned-out TV set playing images of Cyrus Lam vaguely overseeing some kind of occult ritual sacrifice — may also extend to transporting entities. And to closing for good the Red Door that is so perilously open right now, allowing demons to come and go from Gemma’s dream and waking states.

Gemma’s increasing frailty and the newfound demands of being a spiritist courier now tasked with the most important job of all provide star Eve a fine enough base to play. That’s despite a screenplay also written by Chase (the writer/director of the dull mommy-daughter thriller “Come Play“) that prioritizes jump scares coming at you from the screen rather than three-dimensional human beings. And jump scares are abundant throughout “Out of the Further,” in place of any psychological complexity beyond ambiguous brushes with how we try to organize our grief around past traumas seeping into the fabric of our present.

Gemma’s astral-projecting capabilities, as an overwritten script leaps lumpily throughout timelines to explicate, were likely inherited from Ingrid, who maybe wasn’t actually mentally disturbed and in serious need of a wellness check but instead was being haunted by the classic troupe of “Insidious” villains: Spirit Halloween-grade, “Carnival of Souls”-like specters in dusty evening wear, caught dead in a fancy party that never stopped. And if Gemma caught her mother’s psychic disease, what does that mean for little Maya?

A late-August release date for a horror title is typically the kiss of death, a summer dumping ground only occasionally revitalized by movies like 1999’s “The Sixth Sense” — whose, for millennials anyway, childhood-scarring shot of a bathrobe-clad ghost with slit wrists gets a lazy shout-out here. No need to reiterate how much the stakes of the horror genre have been upped this year, so much that “Insidious: Out of the Further” needs to seriously justify itself for being so bad. The function of the jump scare, which is I know I know integral to the genre’s machinations, has changed, too: Its purpose now is to get people in the audience to look up from their smartphones, especially helpful if you’re sitting in an Alamo Drafthouse. Perhaps the jump scares here also helped shake the filmmakers out of their lethargy in post-production. Something to live for, something to do.

There’s also the issue of the dank-blue, drained-of-all-life filter painted over the film‘s coverage shots, here overseen by cinematographer Dave Garbett. That Amelia Eve’s breakout credit came courtesy of a Mike Flanagan joint disappointingly reminds of how much the filmmaker/TV creator’s signature aesthetic — often underlit to the point of incoherence, and ever a steely gray-blue to convey an uncanny inner awfulness — now defines the genre’s visual palette in 2026. If everything is already imbued with the pallor of the dead from the start, then nothing is scary or unexpected.

Direly, dreadfully boring, “Insidious: Out of the Further” has money on the brain. So do most things, but this time, it’s way too conspicuous and underserving of the epochal year Blumhouse-Atomic Monster is having between “Backrooms” and “Obsession.” And the comparisons will only stop when the slop stops being poured.

Grade: D

Sony releases “Insidious: Out of the Further” in theaters starting Friday, August 21.