A young single mom and her daughter have a special ability that hellish entities want to exploit. There’s devoted love in the heroic side of things. But this film is dark and riddled with demonic terrors. And the language can get a bit foul, too.
When Gemma was a child, she had to endure a particular ongoing horror: Her mom.
It wasn’t that Gemma’s single mother was a completely terrible person. In her “sane” moments, she was loving and gentle. But during her wild-eyed fits, the woman was nothing less than a demon. And Gemma’s ongoing torment lasted right up until the night when Mom screamed out “Watch Me!” and then proceeded to bash out her own brains on the bathroom shower tiles.
Twenty years later, and Gemma is now a single mom herself. In fact, she and her 9-year-old daughter, Maya, live in Gemma’s childhood home, one that she inherited after her mom’s demise.
Why in the world would she stay in a house filled with dark, horrible memories? Well, Gemma’s boyfriend, Nick, often wonders the same thing. And Gemma declares that it wasn’t the house that was evil. Besides, the home is paid for. And she and Maya are filling it with new, loving memories.
There is, however, one small issue. Gemma has been having these odd, foul dreams. Sometimes they’re about her mom. But other times they’re dreams that take place in a dark and murky netherworld. It’s a realm populated with corpse-like people who gaze at Gemma with a look of longing. And not only that, but sometimes Gemma wakes up with some odd object in her bed—something that she remembers handling while in that nether realm.
It’s all so unsettling. And what’s worse, Gemma’s nightmares are beginning to bleed over into her waking life. As these strange and troubling instances mount, Gemma starts to question her own sanity. What if these walking nightmares aren’t just because of some past trauma? What if these visons are something that her mother was dealing with, too? That might explain some things. Could it be a genetic mental issue?
Then an even more terrible question hits Gemma like a bloody brick: Will Maya be plagued by these things, too?
Gemma loves her daughter and fights for her well-being. In fact, both mother and daughter voice their love for one another. Boyfriend Nick is ready to step up to help and protect the women, too (even though he is quickly batted away by evil forces).
[Spoiler Warning] We find out later that Gemma’s mom wasn’t driven by drugs or mental issues (both implied early on) but that she suffered with the same “ability” that Gemma has. And she was willing to ultimately take her own life to protect her daughter from an evil spirit. Elise, an elderly character who has been a part of all the Insidious movies, shows up in the Further realm to aid Gemma in her struggles.
As with all the Insidious movies, the spiritual happenings on screen can be viewed as both a warning against dabbling in the realms of the dead and the demonic and, in a way, as an enticement to crack that doorway open.
Both Gemma and Maya have the genetic ability to travel into the dark realm of the Further and carry objects and even individuals with them. (It’s not always consistent or fully explained, but Gemma and Maya are tapped as conduits for many to escape this underworld.) Their carrier abilities bring evil spirits, ghouls and horned demons into the “physical plane.”
It’s also not fully explained why Elise is a good spirit that’s trapped in the Further and able to battle the many foul entities there. There’s an odd, unexplained twist in this story where living “acolytes” of a deceased evil man are able to use a drug to transport their spirits into the Further while their bodies sleep in the physical plane.
Gemma learns about the powerful and evil man, Cyrus Lam, from a videotaped ritual where he crosses over into the Further. He’s clearly being worshipped by his crowd of human acolytes. He gains great power in the dark realm and promises to find a way to open a pathway between the Further and the real world, hoping that hordes of evil creatures will spill into the physical plane. Lam communicates with, and torments, all the women in Gemma’s family, and he uses unspecified powers to torture, batter and kill living people.
Gemma finds herself trapped in visions that are forced upon her. One involves her job as a dental hygienist. She works on a patient who comes to her with rotting teeth and gums (shown in up-close detail) and finds herself drawn into a grotesque sort of supernatural dental horror featuring long clumps of hairs, breaking teeth and multiple jaws.
Gemma is sent into the Further where she encounters many different creepy entities, including a young girl with torn, bleeding gums who holds a chest full of pulled teeth. Gemma is tied to a chair where spirit hands touch and caress her face and shoulders. And a ghoulish dentist puts his fingers and a whirling drill into her mouth.
In another instance, Gemma crawls into her daughter’s pillow fort, only to become trapped in an ever-narrowing tunnel of immovable cushions that eventually squeezes and smothers her. She’s grabbed and bloodied by grinning creatures who are in the narrowing tunnel with her.
Elise takes spiritual possession of two different people in the physical plane.
Maya is grabbed and dragged around by Cyrus Lam. He places her on a table and forces her to repeatedly bring dark creatures from the Further into the physical world.
In the midst of her various visions, Gemma is shown images of a ghostly woman killing boyfriend Nick. Gemma eventually comes to the conclusion that she is haunted. An ominously voiced demonic force from the Further communicates with Maya, telling her it’s watching her sleep. There are also a variety of spiritual jump scares in the mix, including quickly appearing faces, disembodied legs, shadowy figures stepping out of the dark, etc.
Nick spends the night at Gemma’s to protect her and sleeps in her bed. (They’re both dressed and nothing intimate takes place.) We see a sleeping Gemma in a tank top that reveals cleavage.
Besides the gory suicide scene featuring Gemma’s mother (that includes her repeatedly slamming her head into a wall and a large pool of blood seeping out from under a door), several other people are killed in Gemma’s neighborhood. An elderly couple across the street are murdered, their bodies wrapped in tarps and hidden in their attic. (We don’t see the actual murders but do see their corpses.) A young female neighbor has her throat slashed by a sharp blade, spattering a painting and a wall with blood. And three elderly acolytes have their throats slashed by their disappointed master.
A ghoulish entity appears with its lower body cut off. It drags itself across a bedroom floor before expiring. Gemma and Nick then stash the partial body in a freezer. An individual is swarmed by a crowd of angry entities and demons that grab and tear at him. (It’s implied that he is then ripped to pieces.)
In other cases, people are chased by folks with large blades. Someone is killed by a shotgun (and someone else is threatened by the same weapon). When Lam forces Maya to do his bidding—pushing her into the Further with a bladed finger—it becomes evident that the young girl is in a great deal of pain, equivalent to torture. Eventually she begins bleeding from her eyes.
Nick slaps and tazes three elderly acolytes in an attempt to wake them from their drugged sleep. Early on, Gemma’s mom appears to be chasing her with a large kitchen knife. The acolytes nail pictures of both Gemma and Maya up on a wall, smearing the photos with their own blood in a ritual-like ceremony. Nick shoots Lam several times to no effect. Gemma has her fingernail ripped off by an individual with a pair of pliers.
The dialogue contains two f-words and a half-dozen s-words along with several uses each of the words “a–” and “b–ch.” God’s name is combined with “d–n” once.
Several people hook themselves up to large tanks of a sedative gas to keep themselves asleep. Early on, it’s implied that Gemma’s mom is either an alcoholic or a drug addict (though neither is the case).
During Gemma’s dental horror sequence, she uses dental tools to scrape and pull out gross substances from an individual’s mouth. Three elderly acolytes take over a neighbor’s home after killing the occupants. Gemma breaks in to find a huge pile of uses adult diapers in a corner of the living room. Gemma watches a memory from her past, realizes that her mother was actually protecting her, and laments the fact that she hated her for it. In one Further moment, Gemma is groped and licked by a crowd of creatures.
It seems you can’t keep a (good?) horror franchise down. The fifth entry in this movie series, Insidious: The Red Door, appeared to be the pitch-black denouement of the long-running story ark, wrapping up all the many gory fingers and tongues of the Lambert family’s insidious terrors in one blood-soaked package.
But no, foolish mortal. The franchise’s caretakers still have horrors to inflict, demons to unleash and wallets to wring.
So, Insidious: Out of the Further introduces characters with a new ability that no one would ever want. Not only are the protagonists “travelers” (someone with the ability to move into the Further, a dark realm of the corrupted and demonic), but they are also “carriers” (someone who can take objects, people and demonic entities to and from that horrid place).
Yes, the previous movies were obsessed with doors and keys and a particular good woman who died five movies ago. But don’t worry about all that gobbledygook. It’ll show up again, sooner or later.
Instead, the filmmakers tell us, we should simply buy a ticket and steel ourselves for new onslaughts of rancid, dental-horror and breath-smothering dread. Just let the new agonies flow and allow the expository puzzle pieces to fall where they may.
In light of all that, though, I will give credit where credit is due. Director Jacob Chase does land this collection of jump-scares, grotesqueries and black-shadowed gloom with a satisfying landing. New protagonist Gemma is able to outfox a whole legion of slavering hellspawn instead of just one lipstick-faced incubus, this go ‘round. I mean, you gotta up the ante.
However, that one moment of relief doesn’t exactly justify tormenting yourself with the other 105 minutes of head-bashing suicide, bloody child-torture and putrescent muck that’s spread on the screen. Doing that is just, well, foolish, mortal.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
