Rent Insidious (2011)

Insidious review by Alyse Garner - Cinema Paradiso

From the makers of the Saw series, Insidious tells the story of a family who are tortured by an unexplained presence as their son lies comatose in his bedroom.

Renai Lambert (Rose Byrne) and her family have recently moved and she finds herself tormented by the sounds of running footsteps, threatening voices and moving furniture when alone in the house. She soon begins to fear for her son as he lies in his room. Things take a sudden turn when she finds a bloody and clawed handprint on his bed covers.

Attempts to exorcise a demon from the house fail because as the family learn it is not the house that is haunted, but rather their son. The child, Dalton (Ty Simpkins), is an accomplished astral projector, whose spirit travels out of his body at night and has become lost in an evil dimension.

The film is tense and certainly managed to make me jump and gasp several times; however it lacked substance and real fear. The film holds its cards close to its chest until the third act when you finally learn of Dalton’s spiritual ability to transcend this plain. This is a bit of a sudden revelation and leaves you feeling a little let unfulfilled. Had they introduced this theme earlier then the film had the capacity to be great, but it’s inability to build on the theme make the film a series of sudden loud noises and shock reveals that simply make the audience jump, rather than utilizing it’s potential creepiness and leaving the audience looking over their shoulders.

Lovers of the Saw movies will also be somewhat disappointed as the film also lacks their tell-tale gore and blood of those movies. Thus it fails to strike a cord in either the gut or the brain.