Insidious
In the immortal words of Riggs and Murtaugh, I’m too old for this shit. That’s what I couldn’t get out of my head while watching the new film from writer Leigh Whannell and director James Wan, who began the “Saw” franchise in 2004. They have moved on since then, with the unseen-by-me “Dead Silence” and now this movie. Even without “Saw’s” unrelenting gore, these two know how to make a guy squirm in his seat. Like I said, I’m getting too old for this shit.
The movie begins like many horror movies before it: A family has moved into a new house. Meet the Lamberts: Josh (Patrick Wilson), the dad, is a teacher; Renai (Rose Byrne), the mom, is a stay-at-home songwriter; and they have three children: Dalton (Ty Simpkins), Foster (Andrew Astor), and little baby Cali. As they settle in, strange things begin to happen– nothing too off-the-wall for a horror movie, just your typical creaking floors, strange voices, and leering shadows that don’t need to be there. One day, little Dalton lands in a coma after he is followed by these strange things up to the attic. However, it is not quite a coma, and as the Lamberts are going to find out, this isn’t your typical haunted house.
Sadly, the trailers have already tipped you off to one of the big revelations of the film, but Wan and Whannell (who appears as part of a research team) have several more in store, and that is where “Insidious” becomes less “Paranormal Activity” cheap scares and more “Drag Me to Hell” horror tour de force. Nothing about “Insidious” is “cheap.” With each moment, Wan builds up the tension for both the family in the film and the audience watching them and springs us into an even more dramatic scenario once the truth of the family’s terrors comes to the surface. The faint of heart need not apply; though it doesn’t trade on blood and guts (the PG-13 is not a sign of weakness in this film), the film is all about intensity and suspense, using visual effects sparingly but effectively, relying on traditional camera trickery rather than non-stop CGI. This is one of those films that causes fits of nervous laughter at moments when the viewer knows they should be screaming, like a brilliant scene in which a ghost is running around the house toward a climax that is unexpected and truly terrifying rather than just the same-old same-old. Wan, making his best film in a career that also includes the underrated “Death Sentence,” has studied the craft of the scary movie well.
What makes “Insidious” a throwback-style masterpiece (i.e. a throwback to the days before the hack-and-slash style of cinema that came to a head in “Saw” took over) is more than just Wan’s direction and Whannell’s narrative inventiveness, however. Like most other great films (and admittedly, this is a somewhat loose use of that adjective), it comes down to the story and characters, and we do care about this family, so we are sucked into this otherworldly situation in which they are forced to make some difficult choices and leaps of faith in order to keep their family intact. These choices include one in particular when Josh’s mother (Barbara Hershey) shows her son some childhood photographs she had hidden away. I wouldn’t dream of sharing where it goes from there; all I will say is that even the most cynical genre fan won’t see it coming.
