Insidious: Out of the Further is the sixth film in a franchise that, three years ago, publicly announced it was going to rest until somebody had a great idea. That was the pitch after The Red Door in 2023 — leave it alone, come back when there’s something worth saying.
They came back. Whether there was a great idea is the question this review is going to spend some time on.
The setup: Gemma (Amelia Eve) is a young mother who discovers she can travel into the Further, the purgatorial realm of lost souls the series has built five films on. The twist is that she isn’t merely astral projecting like everyone before her — she’s what the film calls a courier, able to carry things out as well as in. Once the things living there work out what she can do, our world becomes available to them.
The Cast
Lin Shaye is back as Elise Rainier, and at 82 she remains one of the more reliable presences in modern horror. The film’s problem isn’t her — it’s what it asks her to do, which we’ll come to.
Every Box, Dutifully Ticked
The pacing compounds it badly. At 1 hour 46 minutes this should move briskly; all three of our reviewers independently said it felt like three hours. One noted the exact moment he knew: the title card lands after the opening setup, the score swells — and it swells over nothing. If that’s the peak the film has been building toward, there isn’t much behind it.
The exposition is the other pacing killer. Rather than trusting the audience or the visuals, the film repeatedly stops so a character can explain the lore aloud — at one point effectively reciting the previous five films’ backstory to camera. It’s writing for someone who has the movie on while doing the washing up.
Gross-Out Where Scares Should Be
This is the sharpest structural criticism our reviewers landed on: Out of the Further substitutes disgust for fear. There is, by one count, roughly one proper jump scare in the entire film. What there is instead is a run of sequences designed to make you recoil — extended, clinical body horror involving mouths and dental work in particular.
Being made queasy isn’t the same as being frightened, and the film seems not to have noticed the difference. One reviewer’s comparison was watching eye surgery footage: unpleasant, certainly, but nobody would call it suspense.
The Further’s inhabitants don’t help. Most are variations on pale makeup and dark lips, and the film’s own power scaling undermines them — full demons demonstrate no more menace than a background nurse, and characters carried over from earlier entries appear briefly, do very little, and leave. The red-faced figure that dominates the marketing is on screen for moments and accomplishes nothing.
There Are Genuinely Good Bits
The background concept is better than the film built on it, too. There’s a cult figure who promises the dead he’ll return them, enslaving and killing mediums to do it — a premise our reviewers actively wanted more of, and which the film largely leaves as scenery.
That’s the frustration in miniature. The raw material here is stronger than the last two entries. All three reviewers agreed this beats The Last Key and The Red Door on concept and on individual sequences. It just never assembles into anything.
The Franchise Has Always Made Money
| Film | Budget | Box Office |
|---|---|---|
| Insidious (2010) | $1.5M | ~$100M |
| Chapter 2 (2013) | $5M | $161M |
| Chapter 3 (2015) | $11M | $113M |
| The Last Key (2018) | $10M | $167M |
| The Red Door (2023) | $16M | $189M |
| Out of the Further (2026) | ~$18M | TBD |
This is why the franchise keeps returning regardless of quality — and why the 2023 promise to let it rest was never especially credible. The Red Door was the highest-grossing entry in the series. Nobody shelves that.
At roughly $18 million, Out of the Further carries the largest budget the series has been given. Our screening had a single-figure audience, though a Friday matinee is hardly a verdict.
The Problem Might Be Structural
Because that’s the strangest thing about Out of the Further: the Further itself is the least interesting place in it. It’s flat rather than mysterious — and when a blanket fort in a suburban living room is more unsettling than your supernatural realm, something has gone wrong at the concept stage.
The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly
| The Good | The Bad | The Ugly |
|---|---|---|
| The Couch Fort SequenceGenuinely excellent — a blanket structure opening into an impossible liminal interior, allowed to linger, leaning into backrooms dread. Our reviewers agreed it’s a scarier Further than the Further, and it’s paired with the film’s most creative camerawork. | Assembled Rather Than WrittenEvery franchise component present and correct — the medium, the tattooed stand-in, the dog, the suspect mother, the power-of-family pivot — with nothing underneath. Our reviewers’ shared read: a checklist, not a film. | 1h 46m That Feels Like Three HoursAll three reviewers independently said the same thing. The title card lands on a swell over nothing, and the film never builds past it. Repeated stops for characters to recite lore aloud finish the job. |
| Better Than the Last TwoUnanimous among our reviewers: on concept and individual sequences this beats The Last Key and The Red Door. The courier idea is the first genuinely new mechanic the series has added in years, and the cult backstory is a strong premise going spare. | Disgust Instead of FearRoughly one real jump scare, and a great deal of clinical mouth-and-dental body horror in its place. Being made queasy isn’t being frightened, and the film doesn’t appear to know the difference. | The Further Is the Dullest Place in ItFlat rather than mysterious, populated largely by pale makeup and dark lips, with power scaling so inconsistent that full demons pose no more threat than a background nurse. Legacy figures appear, do nothing, leave. |
| Lin Shaye, Still Lin ShayeAt 82 she remains one of horror’s most dependable presences, and the film is better whenever she’s on screen doing something real. | The Rest of the Cast Doesn’t RegisterPerformances our reviewers found uniformly average, with nobody they were rooting for. For a film resting on a new lead, that’s a problem. | Cringeworthy Hero MomentsThe film keeps asking Elise to be an action hero, complete with crowd-scattering heroics that sit badly against everything the character has been. It’s the wrong use of the best thing it has. |
The Verdict
Insidious: Out of the Further is a better film than the two that preceded it and still not one we can recommend seeing in a cinema. That’s an uncomfortable pair of statements to hold together, and it’s the honest position.
The ingredients are there. The courier concept is the first meaningful addition to this world in years, the cult backstory is genuinely intriguing, and the couch fort is a properly good horror sequence that suggests somebody involved knows what they’re doing. But those moments sit inside a film assembled from parts, padded with exposition, and reaching for revulsion where it should be reaching for dread.
Our three reviewers landed independently on 4 out of 10, with one adding the useful caveat that committed franchise fans could reasonably call it a 6 — it does expand the mythology, and if you’re still invested in the Further you’ll find more here than in the last two outings.
The honest read: if you love this series and aren’t tired of it, wait for streaming and you’ll probably have a fine time. There’s more going on here than in The Red Door, and the fort sequence alone is worth catching.
If you’re a casual horror viewer, skip it entirely. There’s roughly one scare in 106 minutes, and everything else is either something you’ve seen a hundred times or something designed to make you feel ill.
There’s a spin-off, Thread: An Insidious Tale, reportedly still in development. On this evidence, the franchise’s problem isn’t that it needs more entries — it’s that it needs someone to say no to a few of them.
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