Insidious (2011)

2011
Directed by James Wan
Starring Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne and Barbara Hershey

I'm on record with my like of "evil ghost" movies.  They've done an admirable job reinvigorating the horror genre in recent years, dragging it out of the muck that was the nonstop barrage of remakes that peppered the landscape throughout much of the '00s and the intermittent "atritionary torture" films in the Saw/Hostel vein.  Having said that, I also think that they've more or less run their course by now and, much like Owen Hart, it's time for a change.

That's not to say that there haven't been some very quality flicks in this subgenre.  The one in question today is a good starting point.  James Wan is the guy behind the director's chair for many of the ghost movies, and Insidious has actually turned into an honest-to-goodness franchise before anyone has even realized it.  I have yet to check out the sequels, mainly due to the maddening ending in this movie, but I'm told that they're also a good, fun time in theaters that don't require you to think too much.  A description that fits much, much better than, say, The Avengers: Age of Ultron.  Having checked out this movie for the first time since I saw it in a packed movie house, I actually found it to be a bit better than I remembered, and it's as good of a starting point as any into the realm of Creepy Demon movies.

Bare essentials time: you've seen this movie a bunch of times before.  It's all in the execution, and fortunately James Wan knows how to execute.  A new family moves into a creepy house.  There's father Josh (Wilson), mother Renai (Byrne), sons Dalton and Foster and infant daughter Cali.  Throughout the first act, we get intermittent incidents that tell us something is NOT RIGHT with this house (cue dreadful dreary music).  Fortunately, the story doesn't waste much time with this conceit as one of the sons promptly falls out of the attic and soon falls into something else...a coma. 

It's a plot device that I haven't seen before in this kind of film, and it works really well.  After months of treatment without result, Josh and Renai begin to notice with increasing voracity that, yes, indeed, something is NOT QUITE RIGHT with this house.  That's the last time I make that lame joke, I promise.  There is actually one jump scare that did a number on me in the theater involving the dark figure that Renai sees in their daughter's room, and the scripting of this portion of the movie is done very well, building a sense of dread while giving the audience a good inkling of what the family is going through in a way that is only periodically melodramatic.  So +2 points to the movie there.

Once the spiritual brigade gets involved, however, the movie really cranks it up the 11.  As the incidents pile up, Josh and Renai call in the best set of paranormal investigators this side of Poltergeist.  How good?  One of them is played by Lin Shaye.  So eat it.  Shaye is the leader of this team, a psychic who can immediately tell that there is an otherworldly presence in the house and explains that Dalton - a kid with the ability to travel to "The Astral Plane" - has traveled too far into something that she calls the "Further" and is in essence stuck in limbo.  Only Dalton has brought back a demon.

The final third of the movie consists of the usual seance/exorcism sequences that films like this bank on.  The script shows some creativity by making Josh into this movie's JoBeth Williams, as he connects these incidents to a series of creepy happenings from his own childhood involving an old woman that he used to be tormented by as a child.  The only way to save Dalton is for him to venture into the Further himself, and that's our confrontation.  There are a few unintentional laughs in this sequence in regards to the way that the demon actually LOOKS, but thankfully we only get fleeting glimpses of him.  An then we get the wholly depressing, completely devoid of any hope ending that no doubt set up the sequel, the prequel, and the seventeen films that will no doubt be forthcoming.

Ending aside, Insidious has a lot going for it.  Wilson is excellent as the rare MALE who gets the strong hero role in a movie of this nature, while Byrne does decent enough as the concerned, worrying mother.  Wan's directing style is one that does depend on jump scares, but they're jump scares that are based on things that actually WOULD scare us if they were around.  As opposed to, you know, bullshit like dogs or cats jumping out of shadows.  The movie loses some steam when the paranormal investigators become involved, because we've seen that part of the movie many times before.  That momentum is regained in the finale in a big way, and while this is a good movie, I can't help but think that this story was one that could have been wrapped up just fine and been an all-time great in the ghost genre as a single film.

If not for that ending.  Man.

*** out of ****.  Highly recommended if you're a fan of the evil ghost subgenre.  For everyone else, it's worth a rental.  Check it out.