Insidious

Insidious, directed by James Wan of Saw fame, is the type of film that bites off more than it can chew and then spews it all over the living room carpet. The bits left on the carpet resemble one of two things: A very ambitions film, or more likely, a poorly made one. To its credit though, I never felt bored and you might even be able to praise it for trying to do something inventive with the genre, but alas, I will not be doing this.

A large portion of this film is clearly trying to be a standard horror movie. From apparitions to strange voices and objects moving around on their own, the movie hits every beat once, it felt like the writer had a checklist he was working from. It was so paint-by-numbers that I had even forgotten the films tag line, “It’s not the house that’s haunted”.

I was quickly reminded that the film had this clever twist up it's sleeve about 45 minutes in, when it decided to focus on a different type of story. One that spends far less time trying to scare you and most of its time explaining the clever movie tag line. At this point we’re introduced to 4 new characters, including Elise Rainier played by Lin Shaye, who serves as the films exposition machine. She, along with the 3 other characters, in a scene that takes place during the middle of the day, explain everything going on in the movie and it's extremely jarring. I just spent 45 minutes in a haunted house and now I'm not there anymore, instead, I'm in a brightly lit living room, with the films hook being sold to me.

Ignoring the fact that I had not bought into the premise for the rest of the film, the last act of this movie has an insane amount of problems packed into it. Elise is still vomiting information at me, everything seems rushed, there's no sense of danger and it’s incredibly dark. I spent the majority of the time thinking of Nigel from Spinal tap saying, "It's like, how much more black could this be? and the answer is none. None more black". This is horribly compounded by the fact that we just had 30 minutes of exposition explaining everything we're supposed to be seeing in this portion of the movie and I’d like to have seen it.

Overall, it was pretty unsatisfying and I was left feeling like this would have been a much better, albeit different film, if it tried to be more like Mirrormask and less like The Exorcist. You can have your imaginative, unnerving imagery, but the story you're ultimately telling is about this haunted child trying to return home. Instead, the ideas are grafted together, but the surgeon had no idea what he was doing and the stitches he left behind are really obvious and distracting.

All that said, I dug the last 30 seconds.