Review - Insidious - a Good Old Fashioned Ghost Story

James Wan's Insidious is, for the first hour, a truly creepy and effective haunted house chiller. Unfortunately the last half hour is filled with what ghost hunters call "the reveal" but in this sense of the word it is simply the explanation for all the frightening goings on. The reveal, in this case, is needlessly more complicated than necessary and takes us into expository territory far too much instead of piling on the chills the film has so richly provided earlier. I was extremely disappointed in the film's final act (save for a nifty, unexpected final scene) but not enough to dissuade you from seeing the film I hope.

The film starts Patrick Wilson (one of the Watchmen and a strong up and coming actor) and Rose Byrne (Glenn Close's assistant on Damages) as a married couple with three young children who move into a new house. Before you can say BOO! strange things begin happening. At first there are small incidents (books falling off the shelf, missing boxes) but when mom starts hearing strange voices coming from the baby monitor while her baby is in the room she gets concerned fast. It doesn't help that her teacher husband is spending unusually long hours away from home at night for reasons never clearly defined. Oh there is a scene where we see him asleep at his desk but can he be so busy that he has to stay every night so late to grade papers? Is he having an affair? Me thinks his absence is the excuse to keep the mother alone in the house to experience things that he will find hard to believe.

One day their middle son is exploring in the attic (thanks to the door opening by itself, paranormally inviting him) and he falls off a ladder. No big deal. He gets a little bump but all is well yet soon after the boy falls into a coma-like state and doctors have no rational medical explanation for his condition. And then the ghostly encounters begin to increase and become more intense.

Leigh (Saw) Whannell's script is intelligent in that it makes its lead characters believable and not caricatures. These people are scared and I was shocked and amazed that at about the 40 minute mark they actually move out of the house. Were my eyes deceiving me? They actually ran away from what frightened them much like any other normal human being would have done. For years I watch this kind of movie and wonder how these families stay day in and day out to experience these horrors and the only thing they can think to do is call in a priest.

It was at this point that I was really with the movie. It was creepy. It had made me jump two or three times and Wan's direction made the sense of foreboding all the more palpable. With the help of Barbara Hershey, as Wilson's mother, a medium and two ghost hunters (ala Poltergeist) are brought in to investigate. The hunters (one of them played by screenwriter Whannell) provide comic relief that would normally feel out of place but here is a welcome relief from the high tension the film has built up before their entrances. Lin Shaye (best known as Magda in There's Something About Mary) is strong as the medium in a role that could have never been taken seriously had it not been for her convincing performance.

As I said the final part of the film gets a little too bogged down in information for my tastes and sacrifices tension for it. If you remember in Poltergeist mom Jobeth Williams goes into some sort of other dimension to rescue her daughter. The filmmakers wisely kept the action on this side as we waited. In this film the filmmakers follow the father to the other side and what we get is tantamount to one of those Halloween haunted houses where kids in scary masks jump out from dark places. It's a real shame that the payoff is not equal to the terrific set up. Considering this was made by the writer and director of the original Saw I was expecting a blood bath with no thrills but got quite a thrilling movie with very little blood.

Good haunted house movies are few and far between. The Uninvited, The Haunting (original 1963 version), The Changeling and Paranormal Activity are the top tier of that genre. Insidious certainly doesn't rank as high as those but considering that good haunted house movies are so few and far between, it was a refreshing surprise to find myself on edge more than once during the movie and allowing myself to forgive some of the silliness in the late scenes.

Insidious is a good ghost story with some chills and thrills. It's exactly the kind of film the advertisements have promised - only this time it delivers.