Most of the reviews of Insidious focus on how scary it is (or not scary, according to the reviewer). That’s the problem with genre movies: comedies are judged on whether they make us laugh, horror films on whether they make us scream. All that, however, is subjective; not to mention – at the risk of sounding terminally jaded – that I haven’t been truly unnerved by a Hollywood horror, nor truly laughed at a Hollywood comedy in years (probably not since The Grudge and Role Models, respectively). It’s true that Insidious isn’t very scary in its final section – yet it’s interesting that it goes in that direction, veering into Clive Barker-like fantasy after an hour of slow-burning ghost story that gets under your skin. Note that the film is called ‘Insidious’, not ‘Terrifying’.
An ordinary family with three young kids move into a new house. Almost immediately, strange things start happening. Books are found on the floor, though no-one admits to having dropped them. The baby cries for no reason. Mum (Rose Byrne) can’t find her sheet music, then eventually finds it in the attic. Doors creak open, and mysterious rumblings are heard. Dalton, the older boy, seems especially affected. “I don’t like when he walks around at night,” says his younger brother, shutting his bedroom door to keep out his night-terrors. Then, a few hours after a suspicious accident in the attic – which seems to be where most of the house’s negative energy is located – Dalton falls into a coma. The doctors are baffled, but Rose knows what’s going on. “There’s something wrong with this place,” she tells her husband (Patrick Wilson). “It’s like a sickness”. She walks to the kitchen at night to get a drink of water, she adds, and can feel eyes watching her.
This is all good stuff, made even better by playing fair. Paranormal Activity and its sequel mined similar terrain in recent years (Oren Peli, who directed PA, is among this film’s producers) but it drove me nuts when, for instance, in PA2 the family equipped their haunted house with wall-to-wall cameras then promptly neglected to check them when things went bump in the night. No such idiocy in Insidious: Dad is admittedly loath to believe Mum’s babblings, but he does the obvious thing – which families in haunted houses never do – calls in the movers, and moves the clan to a non-haunted house. Hooray for sanity! Alas, the evil spirits pursue them – which is where the film explains what’s ‘really’ going on, and goes off the rails slightly.
Insidious is a well-crafted movie, though it’s hard to know if the loose ends are really red herrings (or vice versa). I assumed it must be relevant when Dalton and his mum wear the same pyjamas in an early scene, hinting at a hidden connection, but apparently not. I took careful note of a book glimpsed on a shelf in the first 10 minutes – ‘Self-Healing Through Music’ – but I needn’t have bothered. More worryingly, plotting gets sloppy in the second half. There’s a rushed, clumsy bit where Dad says no to a sιance (Lin Shaye plays a chirpy psychic, in what seems to be a nod to the 1982 Poltergeist) then notices Dalton’s disturbing drawings on his bedroom wall – which you’d think someone would’ve noticed earlier – and immediately says yes. Above all, the ‘answer’ to the question of Dalton’s mysterious coma doesn’t really chime with the fact that the house was obviously dodgy long before the kid fell ill. It feels like writer Leigh Whannell started out writing one kind of movie then switched to another, not really caring for consistency.
That’s quite possible, since Whannell also wrote (and director James Wan directed) the original Saw, another film that started out tight – two people trapped in a room – and became increasingly outlandish. Saw was (and is) deeply silly, and the same could be said about the final act of Insidious: a pair of geeky ghostbusters show up, then the old-lady psychic who wears a gas mask to a sιance and at one point starts spouting doggerel. “Now you’re outside / Let my voice be your guide,” she recites. “Keep a steady stride / Into the Further you go!”. You may find yourself longing for the smouldering ghost story of the early scenes.
Yet Insidious never topples over into all-out badness. Maybe it’s because the haunted-house story comes to a natural end (with our heroes moving out), so we’re ready for the next level. Maybe it’s because the climactic fantasy is imaginative, with creepy visuals – and creepy use of a breezy old song, ‘Tiptoe Through the Tulips’ – that owe something to David Lynch. It’s a film of two halves, but remains very enjoyable. Is it scary? Not particularly, no. Does it matter? Not particularly, no.
DIRECTED BY James Wan
STARRING Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne, Barbara Hershey
US 2011 103 mins.
