There comes a point in every film franchise — horror or otherwise — when the question stops being “What happens next?” and becomes “How long can they keep doing this?”
Insidious: Out of the Further, the sixth entry in the series, gives a fairly industry-standard answer: longer than they probably should.
While Insidious has long stopped being ‘insidious’, to its credit, the film does what a sequel this deep into a franchise often always does. It leaves the Lambert family — the franchise’s main protagonists — behind and introduces a new set of victims. Gemma (Amelia Eve), a dental hygienist and single mother, lives with her young daughter Maya (Island Austin) in the same house where her own troubled mother committed suicide years earlier.
Despite the suicide, normalcy continues and her everyday tasks hardly change — like taking out the trash — but there’s something different: strange old neighbours with malevolent smiles begin walking the streets. Soon, Gemma starts slipping involuntarily into the Further — the otherworldly realm of demons and ghosts — and she discovers that her unusual ability allows her not merely to enter this spirit world, but also to bring things back from it!
Insidious: Out of the Further adds a few new wrinkles to the long-running horror series, but even the most inventive ideas cannot disguise a franchise running out of ideas — or scares
That is a decent new wrinkle to the regular mythology. However, Insidious has now reached the stage where even new wrinkles hardly feel celebratory.
The problem is not that the film is terrible — it is okay, though without the scares — it’s that it is familiar to the point of exhaustion.
The Further was once a wonderfully simple and unnerving idea: a low-budget, smoke-filled set, full of darkness, meant to be a dream-like purgatory populated by entities that should not exist. However, its novelty had gone stale by the third movie and the malicious spirits — again, low-budget and uninspiring as they were — didn’t help either.
Here the new villain is Cyrus (Sam Spruell), a dead cult leader who wants to exploit Gemma’s ability to cross between worlds. There are new rules, new apparitions and a few new pieces of nightmare imagery. Still, the scares remain fairly mechanical, with one or two exceptions. A dentist sequence is suitably unpleasant (and somewhat yucky), while a surreal sequence involving Gemma navigating an ever-expanding fortress made from sofa cushions is easily the film’s most inventive set piece… until heads of dead people (mostly actors with bad make-up, smiling) pop out from the sides.
Two or three good ideas cannot carry a 106-minute movie. Lin Shaye’s Elise remains one of the series’ few dependable pleasures and Amelia Eve does what she can with Gemma. Still, the story’s generational-trauma component never develops into anything particularly emotional or insightful.
However, by now, the franchise is no longer expanding because there is somewhere compelling to go; it is expanding because there is still money to be made there. At some point, Insidious will be rebooted. Until then, apparently, the Further will continue to be the centrepiece of less-than-okay-enough, forgettable sequels.
Released by Sony Pictures, Insidious: Out of the Further is rated A for the usual jump scares that just jump, but don’t scare
The writer is Icon’s primary film reviewer
Published in Dawn, ICON, August 30th, 2026
