Insidious is the latest horror offering from Australian duo Leigh Whannell and James Wan, the writer/director team behind the phenomenally popular Saw franchise. This time they take on the supernatural in this twisted take on the haunted house and possession genres. Like Saw (at least the first film in the series) the accent is on suspense, but here their tale is comparatively bloodless and grue-free.
To cut to the chase, there is nothing new on offer here. The film is so reminiscent of its antecedents that for much of its length it seems like an uncredited remake of Poltergeist, right down to the team of psychic investigators made up of two bumbling idiot men and their kindly, concerned female superior (here melded with the Zelda Rubinstein medium character). But this film is in no way in the same league as Tobe Hooper and Steven Spielberg's 1982 classic, and comes off as a poor and clumsy rehash. And there is considerable debt to recent money machine Paranormal Activity in the film's earlier moments (that film's writer-director is a producer here).
That is not to say that Insidious is an entirely bad film, exactly; throughout I kept wondering, if I was much younger (I would suppose the intended demographic for this picture is teens in the 15 to 18 age bracket), and had not seen as many films of this ilk as I have, might I have been more sympathetic in my appraisal? It's shot efficiently enough, the acting is more than adequate - indeed, Patrick Wilson is very good and the usually reliable Barbara Hershey is reliable, as usual - and the themes are eternally resonant genre staples. But it's not enough. There have been too many too similar yet far better films. The piece is shot through with a sense of the "second hand" and the glacial pace (these are 100 of the slowest minutes you will ever sit through) gives ample opportunity to ruminate upon the negatives. Ultimately the film tries the same old hackneyed shock jumps and Halloween party make-up jobs as its desperate attempt at a winning hand. It's a sad experience in the end.
And yet, for all that, it is probably Wan and Whannell's most accomplished film to date. Saw may have kicked off a phenomenon but it was, when all was said and done, merely a moderately efficient time-waster, and the less said about Dead Silence, the abysmal ventriloquist's dummy horror they made, the better. Insidious is better than that. It has a grander sense of scale, actual characters with personalities drawn up on screen and more assured style to the camerawork. It gives the inkling that here is a cinematic partnership beginning to "grow up".
I could imagine some audiences being won over by Insidious, audiences unfamiliar with genre history who just want a few jumps to knock the popcorn from their hands, but I feel that more seasoned horror fans will be left wanting and wondering what might have been.
