The best advice I can give you about Insidious is to not read this review. Seriously. This is the kind of film where less is more. The less you know about this seemingly run-of-the-mill Haunted House movie the better. You've been warned!
The real stars of Insidious aren't Patrick Wilson or Rose Byrne, although both do serviceable well in this film. No, the real stars in this thriller are the things that go bump in the night. The child that darts past a doorway or the shadow above a bed. The things barely seen or unseen altogether are what give this surprisingly affective horror movie its mojo.
Wilson is an overstressed schoolteacher in the film and Byrne a frustrated songwriter. None of this is relatively important to the plot. While I like both actors, just about any male/female combination of 30-something stars could have played these roles. The two form the parental part of the Lambert family, along with two young boys and a baby girl who never seems to stop crying. Trouble begins when the youngest Lambert boy decides to play in the attic, falling from a ladder and seemingly going from slightly bruised to comatose overnight.
Fast forward 3 months later and Mrs. Lambert is near the end of her rope. Her son is a vegetable that no doctor can cure, her husband seems to be working later and later, and she becomes increasingly more freaked out by the strange goings-on in their new house. Cue the inevitable confusion over whether Mrs. Lambert is going crazy with her husband playing the classic role of skeptical concerned bystander. Renai Lambert is SURE things are amiss from the start, from cryptic noises from the baby monitor to mysterious hand prints on her sons sheets. Things go from tense to shit your pants scary seemingly instantly in this film, which I found refreshing... In a shit-your-pants way.
Not too much time was wasted here with the "small" scares. Banging doors and whispers soon give way to flesh and blood monsters seemingly lurking around every corner.
It doesn't take long, thank goodness, for Mr. Lambert to come around and realize the house they live in may truly be haunted. These ghosts don't pussyfoot around. Through Mr. Lamberts mother (Barbara Hershey) the couple enlist the help of a peranormal expert named Elise (Lin Shaye) who also happens to be my favorite character in this movie.
Elise knows from the second she enters the Lambert abode that evil is afoot. She goes through several dazzlingly tense trances in which she makes contact with a malevolent force who is not actually after the family room, but the family itself. Through the use of several bizarre methods Elise gleans that the comatose Lambert boy is slowly being taken over by something from beyond. Together with the Lamberts she devises a plot to reclaim the boys soul and rid the family of their evil spirits.
To say Insidious is full of Haunted House movie cliches is an understatement. If you were to describe the plot to anyone you might just as easily be describing Poltergeist up to the bumbling "paranormal assistants" the Lamberts hire to spook out their ghosts. Somehow the old routine works well here however, with enough surprises and scares to satisfy most horror fans I would imagine. You don't have to mess with the classics. The use of silence mixed with loud sounds to jar you from your seat. The bait-and-switch of pulling back the curtain only to find what was really there to scare you is right behind you. These things have been done to death, but when done as skillfully as they have here it makes for a frightfully fun hour and a half.
The director of SAW teams with the creators of Paranormal Activities here and it shows. A lot of the film reminds me of PA in the way it shows the shattering of mundane life. The brutal and uncaring nature of the grim grinning ghosts who torture this family. Part of the film reminds me of a literal "House of Horrors" as if the director has decided to take us through his very own spook house like you would find in your own hometown. This is all done without blood and with enough "human" ghosts to not make this a CGI catastrophe.
I'd recommend Insidious to anyone who likes this sort of thing. For someone who doesn't mind having their nerve tested a few times. NOT for anyone who has to come to a creaky old house all alone after watching however! I'd recommend a few hours decompression if that is the case before you return home to wait for your own bumps in the night.
Also, if it were possible to make Tiny Tim's "Tiptoe Through The Tulips" any more terrifying this film sure did it!
4 out of 4 stars
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