I was not able to attend the midnight showing of Insidious on its opening weekend like I had planned so instead I watched the veritable classic, Poltergeist. The comparison between the two films is obvious. Both involve a middle-class family with kids in a house where one child goes “missing” and random, weird happenings occur which a middle-aged blonde woman is called in to investigate. Both attempt to be scary as hell also. The difference is that Poltergeist was scary to the 80s crowd where it seems tame nowadays. Insidious is expertly made and harsh enough to make a seasoned horror fan like myself sit up, pay attention, and think about cowering behind the empty theater seat beside me.
Josh and Renai are a typical couple. He is a teacher while she is an aspiring musician when not chasing her three kids around their newly acquired house. One day, their oldest son, Dalton, slips and falls while exploring their creepy attic. The next morning, Dalton is unable to awake and is effectively in a coma even though there is no medicinal explanation for the cause. Soon thereafter, Renai starts seeing and hearing strange things in the house. Strange voices are heard on the baby monitor. The alarm system goes off for no reason. Bloody hand prints appear on Dalton’s bed sheet. It is enough that Renai is convinced that their house is haunted and convinces Josh to move. They do, but the strangeness follows them.
With the exception of Paranormal Activity, the haunted house subgenre of horror is either seen (by myself at least) as being childish or way too tame. It is hard not to be cynical prior to seeing Insidious because of its PG-13 rating but director James Wan and writer Leigh Whannell (both of the Saw franchise fame) do not need to involve over-the-top gore or torture to make a compelling horror film. In some ways, Insidious feels like a movie from a different period of filmmaking, one that is more determined to frighten by the subdued threat as opposed to the one that is constantly jumping out at you.
The first half of this movie is undoubtedly one of the most exhilarating I have ever seen. The haunted house motif that Wan creates is unsettling at times and downright disturbing at others. Rarely is there a moment that you are not looking out for something that will scare the hell out of you whether it be the half-realized figures lurking in the background or the appearance of strange apparitions, even if they do nothing more than seemingly taunt Renai in her fragile mental state. It does not take long for the old-school, almost gothic music of Joseph Bishara to set the mood that almost feels like it invites the happenings.
Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne are phenomenal as the couple struggling with not only their own issues, but of their son’s health and everything else that is happening. Almost from the start, the two have a successful chemistry that most other films cannot come close to attain. This, of course, helps pull you into the drama of the story. On one hand, you feel that Renai is telling the truth but you are still able to identify with Josh’s uncertainty about the situation. Their relationship quite simply sells the movie as genuine as it can be without being too hokey.
The film loses a bit of steam when the paranormal researcher Elise (Lin Shaye) and her assistants (Whannell and Angus Sampson) show up to investigate bringing a lot of exposition and a bit of rather odd comic relief. The experts’ presence does invoke one of the tensest scenes in the film but others merely bring it down, especially with the somewhat absurd explanation of Dalton’s condition and how Josh was previously affected by something similar.
Fortunately though, even with the almost screeching halt of the story for explanatory purposes, everything afterwards is so harrowing that you almost feel that Wan was attempting to give the audience a break leading up to the climax. In almost every way, this is a completely different (yet equally important) film than Saw which is just a testament to Wan and Whannell’s talent and their love of the genre. There are no headache-inducing edits, scenes of gratuitous torture, and really no gore to speak of. All that remains is one of the best horror movies in a while that has no problem with trying to scare the hell out of you without apologies.
Comments
Post a Comment