Insidious: Out of the Further… Into the Plot Device

by C. Rommial Butler

The thing I love most about the Insidious films is Lin Shaye as Elise, along with her two ghost hunter sidekicks, Specs and Tucker.

The sidekicks got kicked to the curb (or more likely didn’t want to participate) and Elise, the friendly ghost, shows up once again from beyond the Further to save everyone's bacon.

Why? Because that’s what she does. She helps people.

This is much the way this film plays out, limping from one conspicuously coincidental coincidence to another.

Performances seem lackluster, almost like the script fatigued the actors.

This brings me to the subject of sequels in general.

Studios make movies for money. When a franchise has brand recognition, they will throw anything together and call it a script.

Growing up, I watched Freddy and Jason and Micheal Myers stumble conveniently back to life (or undeath) through asinine contrivances too. It didn’t lessen my enjoyment of the films, because I didn’t expect anything better.

I went to see the character, and to some extent, I also wanted to see how inventive they would get with a story that should have ended three sequels ago.

In the case of the Insidious films, with its cornucopia of ghost villains, we nevertheless find ourselves waiting for Elise.

When she shows, we feel, in spite of a warranted cynicism towards the odious money grab, a sense of completion upon her appearance.

Though she’s here to help rather than butcher everyone, we’re just as excited to see her as we are to see what shenanigans Jason, Freddy, or Michael will pull next.

I wouldn’t give the sixth Insidious film a high score if I did that sort of thing. It’s pretty bad, all in all. But so was Jason Takes Manhattan, and I’ve rewatched that several times.

Yes, this Insidious film reeks with the stench of sequelitis, the primary symptom of which is a pus-filled sore that oozes plot devices.

All the usual suspects return as far as the undead go, along with a blind-folded Big Bad whose tale is—you guessed it, dear reader!—hurriedly told through a series of convenient plot devices.

Eventually, we get the clever turnabout of realizing how the protagonist’s present self somehow interfered in their past life, and, lo and behold, everything was not as it seems. The villain is really a hero and there was a hidden villain the whole time.

This trope took several films to play out in the beginning of the franchise but is now a default explanation for any emotionally ungratifying loose end. In this film, it was predictable, and the aha! moment fell flat for me.

Nevertheless, it was good to spend time with Elise Ranier, who feels like an old friend, a nice contrast in a genre where we’re usually going to see the villain.

My primary hope, as far as the Insidious franchise goes, is that they will stop making them when Lin Shaye moves on—though we’ll always have the ghost of Elise to remind us why they were worth visiting in the first place.