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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Insidious: Chapter 2’ on Netflix, Where The Past, Present, And Realms Of The Living And Dead Collide

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Insidious: Chapter 2

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When his 2010 film Insidious returned Saw director James Wan to horror and grossed gonzo numbers, a sequel was inevitable, and Wan, together with screenwriter and regular collaborator Leigh Whannell, subsequently framed their 2013 film like a straight addition off of the house they’d just built. Insidious: Chapter 2 arrives on Netflix as Wan’s twisty horror romp Malignant continues to make a splash on HBO Max.  

INSIDIOUS: CHAPTER 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Insidious: Chapter 2 opens with a firsthand look into what its first chapter revealed. It’s 1986, and Lorraine Lambert (Jocelin Donahue, playing a younger version of Barbara Hershey’s Lorraine) receives demonologist Elise Rainer into her home. (Lindsay Seim plays the younger version of Lin Shaye’s Elise.) Lorraine’s young son Josh is in torment from a spiritual presence whose power flabbergasts Elise. “It’s a parasite. I’ve never felt such a malignant presence.” Fast forward twenty-five years, and the Lamberts — Josh (Patrick Wilson), Renai (Rose Byrne), and their sons Dalton and Foster (Ty Simpkins, Andrew Astor) — have moved into Lorraine’s home after the events of Insidious, when Josh traveled into “The Further,” or the realm of the dead, to retrieve Dalton, who possesses powers of astral projection similar to his own. Elise, the demonologist, was killed during that push and pull between the Further Zone and the living world, and the police are trying to determine whether Josh did it.

While Josh tries to act as the voice of reason in the home, Renai is still spooked, and swears she hears horrible things over the baby monitor. Lorraine, meanwhile, hooks up with Elise’s demonology acolytes, Specs (Leigh Whannell) and Tucker (Angus Sampson), and they discover something pretty freaky in the VHS footage chronicling that interview with young Josh back in ‘86. Together with old confidant Carl (Steve Coulter), they summon Elise in the great beyond, and her message is clear: something’s very wrong at the Lambert house, and it seems to surround Josh. The frayed ends of historic traumas thus become a waking nightmare for Lorraine, her crew of eager demon seekers, and poor, put-upon Rose as it becomes clear that Josh is now a vessel for an evil that’s come over from The Further, and efforts to save the real Josh, secure the Lamberts from further spirit world disturbance, and cut off the portal into the beyond transpire both on terra firma and the astral plane.

INSIDIOUS: CHAPTER 2, Patrick Wilson, 2013, ph: Matt Kennedy/©FilmDistrict/courtesy Everett Collecti
Photo: FilmDistrict/courtesy Everett Collection

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Horror references abound here — as a direct sequel, Insidious: Chapter 2 also cannibalizes footage from its first installment — but the original Psycho is a touchpoint, too, as is The Amityville Horror and the 1983 B-movie slasher flick Sleepaway Camp.

Performance Worth Watching: Lin Shaye, the longtime horror genre favorite who also struck comic gold in a string of Farrelly brothers comedies (Dumb and Dumber, etc.) plays the well-deserved heroine role in the Insidious films, and here in Chapter 2, you’ll cheer for her ultimate death blow against a murderous specter.

Memorable Dialogue: “We’ve been through this before. They’ll follow us. You have to just not be afraid. You have to relax.” These empty platitudes from Patrick Wilson as the steadily more unwell Josh set up one of Rose Byrne’s best moments as Renai. She’s the apoplectic spouse, presented with something impossible from her partner. “Relax? I can’t relax! There are ghosts everywhere! It’s like we’re already dead!”

Sex and Skin: Nope.

Our Take: James Wan and Leigh Whannell are having fun in Insidious: Chapter 2. From the blood-red title card accompanied by its crazed, blaring fanfare that begins and ends the film like the cover leaves of a pulpy horror comic, to the quivering frantics of the camera work, to tiny details like the “aso” portion of “Panasonic” taped over on the creaky VHS player in the morbid and freakishly cool seance room at Elise’s house (seriously, it looks like some lair hidden behind the circular saw in the Theatre of Magic pinball game), Wan and Whannell clearly felt freed by the phenomenal success of Insidious, which banked nearly $100 million on a budget of just one of those millions. And that fun and freedom worked again, because Chapter 2 kept the party going to a payday of over $160 million and continued the string that begat two more films in the Insidious universe and overlapped the success of Wan’s imaginings for The Conjuring movies, which place Patrick Wilson in the role of a demonologist.

Wilson is having a good time here, too, inserting menace into his eyes for his moments as a murderer in the mirror before shifting back to his normal, noble self before our own eyes. Together with the notes of comic relief offered by the bumbling antics of Specs and Tucker, Insidious: Chapter 2 never treads into self-serious territory, and this makes its scares successfully of a piece with its overall vibe. There’s even a kind of childlike whimsy that whooshes into the film’s final set piece like so much blue smoke lit by a magic lamp; it’s a quality worthy of the partial 1980’s setting of Chapter 2, and recalls the films of that era that so often asked kids to heroically face the literal manifestation of their fears.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Insidious: Chapter 2 arrives on Netflix just in time to capitalize on the success of James Wan’s Malignant, and will fit right into any Fright Fest movie nights you have planned in celebration of Halloween.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges

Watch Insidious: Chapter 2 on Netflix