Insidious: Out of the Further delivers genuinely terrifying and inventive scares alongside a surprisingly heartfelt story, making it one of the year’s standout horror films.
I have been a huge fan of the Insidious movies for years, and one of the things that has always impressed me most about the franchise is its ability to deliver genuine horror without completely sacrificing the story. So many movies in the genre seem content with a thin plot simply as an excuse to string scares together, but Insidious has generally understood that the best horror comes when you actually care about the people being terrorized. Insidious: Out of the Further continues that tradition and, surprisingly, might be one of the strongest examples of it yet.
First and foremost, the actual thrills are absolutely horrifying. I found myself covering my face multiple times throughout the movie, which is not something I do particularly often with horror films. The movie gets increasingly creative with its setpieces. I loved the sequence involving the seemingly infinite sofa-fort maze, which turns something incredibly ordinary into something deeply unsettling, while the dentist sequence is so deliberately queasy that I genuinely needed to look away (especially when she pulls the hair out of the man’s mouth—I think I might now have a hair-in-mouth phobia). What impressed me most is that these scares don’t all feel like variations on the same “ghost jumping out of a dark corner” trope. Out of the Further finds horror through new mediums: the fear of a loved one that you once trusted, the uneasiness surrounding the elderly, and even something as simple as teeth and dental work. There is a real willingness here to make the audience uncomfortable in ways that feel different from what we have already seen.
What pleasantly surprised me the most, though, was just how much I cared about the story. The movie follows Gemma as she raises her daughter while carrying the trauma of growing up with a mother she believed was mentally ill. As a child, Gemma witnesses her mother take her own life, an experience that she subsequently compartmentalizes as she grows up and causes her to vow to herself to never repeat her mother’s mistakes with her own daughter.
That backstory already gives the movie an emotional foundation, but the payoff is what really got me. Near the end, Gemma gets the opportunity to speak with her mother one more time and finally discovers that the woman she spent her life believing was sick was actually fighting to protect her. Her mother’s suicide was not an act of abandonment, but an attempt to save Gemma from the invisible entity that had been haunting her. I honestly choked up in the theater (also partly due to the incredible portrayals from the actors). It is an intensely heartfelt reveal, and honestly one of the last things I expected to get out of a sixth Insidious movie. The franchise has always dealt with family and parental trauma, but Out of the Further gives those ideas a surprisingly meaningful emotional center.
By the time the credits rolled, I was genuinely surprised by how much I enjoyed Insidious: Out of the Further. The scares are strong, the music and atmosphere do exactly what they need to, and the setpieces are consistently inventive. Most importantly, however, there is an actual story that threads through everything that gives the horror some emotional weight. For me, it immediately stands out as one of the better horror movies I have seen this year, and it has me genuinely excited to see where this universe can go next. If you are a fan of the Insidious movies, or just looking for a horror film that can give you some very real scares while still giving you a reason to care about its characters, I would absolutely recommend seeing Insidious: Out of the Further when you get the chance.
