In an age of large-scale blockbusters and prestige award hopefuls, horror feels like the only real, traditional genre left with sustained output, making Jacob Chase’s Insidious: Out of the Further an especially curious arrival in a landmark year for the form. Recent outings like Backrooms and Obsession—while far from perfect—have turned relatively small scales into a hearty, expansive bastion of carefully drawn identities and mythologies, not only pushing the language and feel of a tried-and-true genre but stirring a discourse that extends beyond it.
Multi-film franchises, like the Insidious series, not only look to stay relevant amid such breakout hits, but ultimately make delightfully garish, biting use of the genre’s seemingly limitless canvas. Yet, in the vein of its title, Insidious: Out of the Further opts to stay very close to home, relying on recycled motifs, cliches, overly familiar setups, and well-worn thrills to zap itself of any personality, provocation, and flair.
It’s unfortunate for a standalone story that devilishly tongues at the freedom of new characters, locations, and ghostly entities—and the boundary-pushing opportunities that come with them. Instead, what remains is a film that, while at certain moments constructed with potent mood, striking imagery, and careful, purposeful staging and blocking, is undone by an incessant penchant for returning to tepid, tried-and-true horror mechanics and payoffs.
Insidious: Out of the Further is undone by returning to the familiar rather than leaning into its strengths.
The result is a horror experience that not only stifles and dilutes any sense of danger and wonder, but one that mires itself in toothless, uninspired bite-sized scares that produce more unintentional laughs instead of jaw-clenching scares—despite, ironically, revelling in extended bouts of dentist-fueled terror.
The sixth entry in the waning Insidious saga centers on Gemma (Amelia Eve), a dental hygienist and single parent of her young daughter, Maya (Island Austin). She tries to make the house she grew up in a bright, beaming home despite the traumatic memories of her own tortured mother linked to it—who, on one fateful night, suddenly took her own life.
The arrival of three sickly and uncanny senior citizens to their neighbourhood suddenly sends Gemma into close contact with “The Further,” a spectral plane between the living and the dead that houses Cyrus (Sam Spruell), a malevolent entity and former cult leader who often undercuts the film’s tension and dread with his hysterical resemblance to Ozzy Osbourne.
Rising haunts and guaranteed scares are undercut by choices made throughout.
In its earlier moments, Insidious: Out of the Further revels in some of the most unique, atmospheric set pieces and imagery of its historically unadventurous and safe series. From a liminal, labyrinthine sofa fort and a freakish double-mouthed X-ray to austere pitch-black voids punctuated by TV static, a literal funhouse of unpredictable ghouls and phantoms, Chase and company abound in raucous, maximalist terror that stands in stark contrast to the more low-key fare of earlier franchise entries.
But for all its attempts to build a singular identity, these sequences remain engrossing for a few fleeting moments, never sustaining enough suspense and mood to carry through the entire experience. Instead, Insidious: Out of the Further too often rushes toward the hollow fun bits, showing little interest in fostering prolonged tension and visual dread.
Despite primarily taking place in a single location, the environment is never afforded the time and space to establish itself as a distinct, layered setting. Rather, it manifests as little more than trite scaffolding for a fleeting gallery of forgettable frights, with each successive scare functioning less as a purposeful escalation and deepening of the last than another disposable attraction awaiting to be hastily unveiled.
It’s a symptom that bleeds into the downtime and “character” moments between its horror set pieces, which unfold with all the drama and intrigue of a pharmaceutical infomercial. Suffused with stiff, stilted performances and direction, these moments serve as a numbing agent, keeping us sedated until the next set-piece mercifully brings us back into the fold, if only for a terribly brief sliver of time.
The mostly single location never develops an identity of its own, instead existing as a nondescript backdrop.
It all gives way to a third act that drops the floor from underneath the already-scattershot experience, when Gemma is rescued by Elise Rainier (Lin Shaye), the deceased medium whose soul inhabits “The Further” and keeps the darkness at bay from within the alternate dimension.
After telling Gemma that she must use her untapped spectral power to stop Cyrus from merging the lands of the living and the dead, Insidious: Out of the Further devolves into an exhausting, eye-rolling exposition dump that routinely forgoes subtle environmental and atmospheric storytelling in favour of dull action-oriented thrills.
Replete with brash Hans Zimmer-esque musical stings, hokey finishing one-liners, and entire heist-like planning sequences that awkwardly enlist sliced oranges as risibly funny visual devices, Chase’s film sheds every sense of danger and takes, stumbling to the finish line as a glorified, carnivalesque haunted mansion that leaves little, feigned impression.
For any franchise that survives long enough to greenlight a sixth entry, the creative well is bound to run dry, and even the introduction of new characters, worldbuilding, and mythologies here does little to replenish it. Insidious: Out of the Further proves that tenfold, consistently eschewing provocative, challenging choices in favor of making the case for its own saga to end, while ultimately scaring us into asking for our money back.
Insidious: Out of the Further releases in theaters on August 21, 2026.
Insidious: Out of the Further
3/10
TL;DR
Insidious: Out of the Further proves that tenfold, consistently eschewing provocative, challenging choices in favor of making the case for its own saga to end, while ultimately scaring us into asking for our money back.