INSIDIOUS: OUT OF THE FURTHER

Born in 2010 from the partnership between James Wan and Leigh Whannell, the Insidious franchise has become one of contemporary horror's great commercial success stories. Made on a modest budget of just $1.5 million, the first film grossed approximately $100 million worldwide, transforming a relatively economical project into a sequel machine and playing a crucial role in launching the careers of its two creators. Since then, four more installments have followed, culminating in Insidious: The Red Door in 2023, and now Insidious: The Further Away, the sixth episode, all conceived for theatrical release. This longevity is easily explained by the numbers: the first five films have collectively surpassed $730 million worldwide, demonstrating just how attached audiences have remained to the horrors of the Further. The problem is that, after the two brilliant films directed by Wan, the franchise has progressively lost its edge, coasting on inertia through increasingly derivative chapters. Insidious 3 and Insidious: The Last Key at least attempted to explore other characters and different points in the timeline, while The Red Door, entrusted to director Patrick Wilson, seemed primarily designed to definitively close the Lambert family's story. The Further Away starts fresh with a new family and new narrative, much like the third film did, maintaining as its main connection to the past the presence of Elise Rainier, the medium once again portrayed by the iconic Lin Shaye. Gemma experienced devastating childhood trauma: her already deeply unstable mother took her own life before her eyes. Today, Gemma is an adult living with her preteen daughter Maya, but the past resurfaces violently when she begins plagued by disturbing nightmares. The visions grow increasingly realistic, and around her home, three mysterious elderly figures appear who seem to be pursuing her. Gemma discovers that what she believed were mere dreams are actually journeys into the Further, the dark dimension populated by lost souls, spirits, and demons that the franchise has taught us to know. But Gemma possesses a particular ability: she doesn't merely enter the Further, she can also bring back into our world what she encounters there. And an entity intends to exploit precisely this power. Since the first installment, one of the most recognizable elements of Insidious has been a certain formal elegance in staging the macabre. James Wan had transformed the creepy into a genuine stylistic signature, constructing fear through framing compositions, silences, sudden apparitions, and an extremely refined use of domestic spaces. The Further Away does not abandon this tradition, and Jacob Chase, already author of the unsettling Come Play, appears genuinely better suited than other directors who have inherited Wan's mantle to restore a certain visual vitality to the franchise. The film indeed possesses more momentum than the two preceding chapters, especially in terms of pacing and the construction of individual horror sequences. The problem is that it seems to live from set-piece moments assembled side by side rather than following genuine narrative progression. There's the highly successful sequence in the pillow tunnel, probably the film's best moment, the scene set in the dentist's office, and a few other effective ideas that work primarily in isolation. When the scares arrive, in short, The Further Away still knows what it's doing. It's in the transitions between these moments that the greater weaknesses emerge. The screenplay signed by Chase, based on a story written with David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick, is quite predictable and seems to have few genuinely new ideas to offer. The Insidious franchise, after all, stopped being particularly innovative after the second installment and has since continued to rework the same concepts, the same mechanisms, and even the same creatures. The idea of the protagonist as a kind of "courier" between the two dimensions represents at least a small variation on the theme, as it allows the Further's inhabitants to use Gemma as a doorway to reach the real world. It's an intuition sufficient to justify a new chapter, but not strong enough to create the genuine impression that the franchise has found a new direction. In fact, once this novelty is exhausted, it becomes difficult to imagine what a potential seventh installment could possibly tell. Curiously, some narrative solutions also recall an old horror that genre enthusiasts will know well—Insidious (2010)—particularly regarding the identity and motivations of the antagonist. But the villain of The Further Away also ends up being less memorable than the creatures that populated the previous chapters. And here the film seems almost aware of its nature as a celebratory episode: there's no shortage of small cameos from some of the franchise's most iconic presences. We see the Black Bride from Insidious 2, the red-faced demon, and the key-fingered demon from the fourth installment, which also appears in the post-credits scene. They are, ultimately, winks designed primarily for fans, much like Lin Shaye's presence, now more of a franchise mascot than an actual character. And this seems to be the destiny of Insidious: The Further Away: a film constructed with professionalism, still capable of delivering some good scares and possessing a sufficiently elegant presentation to justify its theatrical release, yet unable to hide the franchise's progressive creative exhaustion. Insidious: The Further Away is not the disaster it could have been after five films, but neither is it the revival that would have been necessary to justify a new installment. It is, quite simply, the bottom of the barrel for a franchise that has now exhausted nearly all its material and continues to skillfully recycle what still works. A respectable horror film, some good scares, and a polished package, but also the lingering sense that, this time, the door to the Further could have easily remained closed. Insidious: The Further Away arrives in Italian cinemas on August 19, 2026, distributed by Eagle Pictures.