Insidious: Out of the Further Review: The Franchise Finds a Genuinely New Idea

Insidious: Out of the Further is the sixth film in a franchise that had every reason to be coasting by now, and it isn’t. Jacob Chase’s script hands the series a genuinely new supernatural idea instead of just another haunted family working through the same rules Josh and Dalton Lambert established a decade ago, and that idea is good enough to carry a movie with a plot that gets more crowded than it needs to be. It’s a good time at a horror movie. It is not the tightest script the franchise has produced.

Spoiler-light. This review covers setup, characters and the film’s general shape. The ending — including the mid-credits scene — is covered in detail in our ending explained.

A new idea, not just a new family

The premise puts Gemma (Amelia Eve), a dental hygienist raising her daughter Maya (Island Austin) with her cop boyfriend Nick (Brandon Perea), through the same broad shape as every Insidious opener: childhood trauma, a haunted return to the family home, dreams that turn out not to be dreams. What’s different is what Gemma can actually do once she’s in the Further. She’s not just a psychic who can astral-project into the realm the way Josh or Elise can. She’s a Courier — she can carry things across the boundary in both directions, out of the Further and into it. That single mechanical change opens the film up. The threat isn’t a spirit finding a way to possess someone anymore; it’s a dead cult leader with an entire congregation who suddenly has an actual door.

That cult leader is Cyrus Lam, played by Sam Spruell, and he’s the best villain this franchise has had in a while. He’s dead already, trapped in the Further with followers he promised an escape from death, and Gemma’s ability is the first real chance he’s had to make good on that promise. Spruell plays him less like a jump-scare monster and more like a man who’s spent a very long time being patient and is finally impatient — there’s a showmanship to him, a cult-leader charisma that survives dying, that makes him genuinely unsettling in scenes where he’s just talking. The film doesn’t waste him on pure spectacle.

Sam Spruell as Cyrus Lam. The best villain this franchise has produced in years. Credit: Sony Pictures / Screen Gems / Blumhouse.

The people around Gemma

Amelia Eve carries the ordinary-person-in-over-her-head role well; there’s a specific kind of exhausted fear in her performance that fits a mother more worried about her kid than about herself, and the film leans into her day job more than you’d expect — a genuinely queasy dental sequence gets more mileage out of body horror than anything involving the actual Further.

The bigger surprise is Maisie Richardson-Sellers as Clare, a tattoo artist who can channel Elise from beyond and becomes the film’s connective tissue between the living world and Lin Shaye’s returning character. She’s replacing Tucker and Specs as the franchise’s living-world liaison, and rather than feeling like a downgrade, she’s the most purely enjoyable new addition Out of the Further has. There’s a scene where she explains a plan by tattooing a demon onto a grapefruit that shouldn’t work as well as it does — it’s the kind of specific, slightly absurd choice this franchise is at its best when it commits to. Clare doesn’t get much backstory beyond a late, brief mention of her own family, and I wanted more of her by the time the credits rolled. That’s a compliment to the character and a mild complaint about the script.

Lin Shaye remains exactly as reliable as she’s been across five previous appearances, though her role here is smaller and more advisory than in films where Elise was doing the investigating herself.

Lin Shaye and director Jacob Chase on set. Elise’s role this time is smaller and more advisory. Credit: Sony Pictures / Screen Gems / Blumhouse.

The Further still works

This is the section where a lesser sixth entry would be running out of ideas, and Out of the Further mostly isn’t. An early sequence sends Gemma through a claustrophobic maze of pillows and blankets stitched together into an endless tunnel, the dead reaching out from the fabric as she crawls through it, and it’s the most genuinely inventive thing the film does with its setting — a mundane, childlike space turned into something suffocating. Later stretches lean more on the franchise’s established playbook: narrow hallways, things standing just out of focus, a slow push-in timed to a music sting. Those still work, mostly because Chase understands that stillness reads as scarier than motion in this particular kind of horror. They’re also predictable if you’ve seen more than one Insidious movie, and the back half leans on that familiar rhythm more than the opening act’s stronger ideas.

Cyrus’s acolytes. The image sells more dread than most of the film’s individual jump scares. Credit: Sony Pictures / Screen Gems / Blumhouse.

Where it loses points

The plot mechanics get busier than the story needs. Cyrus’s plan involves multiple acolytes holding open a shared trance, Clare’s tattoo-based exposition, Gemma’s own family history with the Courier ability, and a fair amount of explaining how all of it connects, and there’s a stretch in the middle where the movie is more interested in setting up its climax than in building tension scene to scene. None of it is incoherent, but a script this committed to a genuinely new mythological idea should trust that idea more and lean on connective exposition less.

The finale mostly earns what came before it — Gemma’s solution grows directly out of what her ability was established to do rather than a last-minute power-up, which is exactly the kind of payoff a new mechanic like this should get. But the emotional beats around it move fast enough that they don’t land with quite the weight the setup wants them to.

How it works as an Insidious movie

You don’t need the other five films to follow this one. The Courier concept is explained cleanly enough that a newcomer isn’t lost, and the connections to The Red Door stay in the background rather than gatekeeping the plot. For people who do know the franchise, the returning pieces — Elise, the visual language of the Further, a specific mid-credits stinger — feel like they belong here rather than being dropped in for recognition alone. If you want the chronology or the full ending breakdown, the Insidious timeline and the Further’s rules explained cover that ground without spoiling this review any further.

Verdict: 7.5/10

Insidious: Out of the Further does the thing a sixth entry in a franchise almost never manages: it finds an idea worth building a movie around instead of just remixing the last one. Cyrus is a legitimately good villain, the Courier concept gives the mythology somewhere new to go, and the Pillow Fort sequence is the best set piece the series has produced in years. The plot around all of that gets more crowded than it should, and the finale’s emotional beats move a little too fast to fully land. That’s the difference between a very good scary movie and a great one — and this is a very good scary movie.