Synopsis: A young mother raising her daughter in her childhood home learns she can cross into The Further, the purgatorial realm this franchise was built on, and that whatever waits there can follow her back out.
Stars: Amelia Eve, Brandon Perea, Island Austin, Maisie Richardson-Sellers, Sam Spruell, Lin Shaye, Joseph Lopez
Director: Jacob Chase
Rated: PG-13 (strong violent content, bloody images, terror and some strong language)
Running Length: 106 minutes
Movie Review in Brief: The sixth film is the best of the sequels because Jacob Chase clearly studied the other five and then made something of his own. Well-staged shocks, smart world-building, and Lin Shaye still holding it together. 
Insidious: Out of the Further Review: Six Films and Still Frightening
There are movies that scare you, and there are movies that frighten you. Insidious has always been the second kind. The 2010 original cast a shadow of dread that hung around for days and produced images that turned into instant nightmare furniture. Sixteen years and roughly $740 million later, the franchise is still finding rooms in that house nobody has opened.
Insidious: Out of the Further is the best of the sequels, and I don’t say that lightly. Writer-director Jacob Chase seems to have sat down with all five previous films and taken careful notes. His script honors the continuity but the movie is still recognizably his.
Gemma (Amelia Eve, The Haunting of Bly Manor) is a young mother raising her daughter Maya (Island Austin) in the house she grew up in and dating a patient cop named Nick (Brandon Perea, Nope). When long-repressed memories of childhood trauma surface, she discovers she can travel into The Further. Then she realizes something worse: she can bring what lives there back out with her. Once the demons work out what she is, our world turns into their playground.
The Best New Idea This Series Has Had in Years
That premise is the smartest structural move the franchise has made since it split off for Chapter 3. For five films, The Further was a place you visited at your peril. Now the traffic runs both directions, and the rules of the series bend without breaking.
Chase also remembers to make the thing terrifying inside a PG-13, which is harder than it sounds. He builds several set pieces that genuinely got me, including a dental exam sequence that’s horrific for about four separate reasons. You will also never look at a pillow fort the same way again. I’ll leave that there.
The new spirits are the other win. Sam Spruell (H is for Hawk) plays a blindfolded figure who has become a cult leader among the lost. The design work on him is superb. His blindfold looks fused to his face, and costume designer Liz Keogh Palmer built it to read as damaged by The Further itself. A few more nightmare faces join the roster. All of them belong in the Insidious freak show, and you can bet on seeing familiar figures along the way.
Amelia Eve Carries It, With One Small Tell
Eve makes a solid lead. She plays Gemma’s exhaustion before she plays her terror, which is the right order. If I have a note, it’s that you can occasionally catch her working to hide her natural accent. Once you hear it, you keep listening for it.
Perea is warm and useful as Nick, the man being asked to believe something absurd. Maisie Richardson-Sellers (Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens) is the real spark as a tattoo artist who can also project. Richardson-Sellers learned to tattoo for the role, practicing on grapefruit the way working artists do. Two tattoo artists coached her on set, and the work you see on screen is hers.
Melbourne Standing In for New England
Chase (Come Play) shot this in Melbourne, using Docklands Studios and suburbs like Camberwell and Kensington as New England, and you’d never guess. Cinematographer David Garbett shot Evil Dead Rise and won two Emmys for Sweet Tooth. He gives the film a cold, classy surface that makes the grime hit harder when it arrives. Production designer Nick Bassett, another Evil Dead Rise veteran, builds a Further that feels furnished rather than fogged.
Gregory Plotkin edited this with Anna Rottke, and his résumé is a horror education by itself: four Paranormal Activity films, Get Out, Happy Death Day. He knows exactly how long to sit in a wide shot before something moves in it.
Then there’s Joseph Bishara, who has now scored all six of these films and also plays the Lipstick-Face Demon. That kind of continuity is rare, and you can hear it. The score knows what the audience is braced for and takes its time getting there.
Lin Shaye Is the Thread, and That's No Accident
Elise Rainier should not have survived past the first film. Her character died in it. The franchise has spent five movies finding ways to keep Lin Shaye around, and what amazes me is that none of it feels cheap. Elise turns out to be flexible enough to tie together the franchise’s three central families, giving the series an unexpected sense of continuity.
Shaye herself is a great piece of casting history. She’s the sister of New Line founder Robert Shaye, and she became the face of a horror franchise in her seventies. Costume designer Keogh Palmer had to rebuild Elise’s 2010 wardrobe from scratch for this one, because those are the clothes she died in. The scarf was reprinted. The twin set was re-dyed to match. The shoes are the exact shoes.
That’s the level of care running through Insidious: Out of the Further, and it’s why the film works. Chase understood the assignment, then went looking for a door nobody had tried.
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