Insidious (2010) - 2.5/4

The narrative structure of Insidious is a very familiar one: a family begins experiencing peculiar phenomena in their new home; they do what they can to overcome it on their own; then they have recourse in a medium who takes over the show. This formula was crystalized with Poltergeist and has routinely been the basis for haunting dramas ever since. The Orphanage and Insidious are two of the more distinctive films to make use of the formula, The Orphanage by means of its harrowing conclusion and Insidious through pure spook-show gusto.

The plot concerns a boy, Dalton, who falls into a coma. Afterward, Dalton's mom begins to hear spooky sounds from her infant child's room, see shadowy apparitions in quick glimpses, and generally sense that there's "something wrong with that house." As the trailers have made clear already, it's not the house but the boy who's haunted. His comatosed body is, as a parked car is in the ghetto, a vessel just waiting to be occupied. In come the cavalry--some goofy "ghost-hunters" and a medium who seems to know her stuff--to bring Dalton back into his own body.

The film's invented mythology is simultaneously interesting and silly. The notion we're pitched is that New Agers are right and we can indeed astral project some spiritual body outside of our corporeal body (that's latinate for 'bodily body'). The dead have their spiritual bodies cast into some realm called the 'Further', a gloomy mirror of our world. Any living person projecting can wander out to the Further, but at their own peril. Ghosts, or something worse, will try to take his body. They can even hold your spiritual body captive. It's all rather foolish, but it yields some good fruit.

Wan does extract a lot of spookiness and beauty from his collision of astral and real space. The ghost sequences are frequently effective in producing not jumps but chills. One particularly skillful tracking shot of a house exterior in broad daylight, while a supernatural occurrence is visible through the windows, is one of the most unsettling moments in recent supernatural cinema. This barrage of spookiness that comprises the first half of the film is at times masterful and, had the film continued with such strength, may well have resulted in a masterpiece.

However, a masterpiece was not to be. While the latter half of the film is certainly not without its merits, it is dissipated by overactivity, a need, perhaps from the producers, to make 'things happen' rather than allow the film to have its effects. Instead of unsettling occurrences, Wan gives us a red-faced CGI demon scuttling along the walls, reminding me somewhat of an inferior film, The Frighteners. Wan is clever enough to let us see the demon only in short glimpses, though even these are too much.

Where Wan is at his strongest is in shooting the inanimate. He has a unique talent for imbuing the inanimate with the uncanny. Toys, photographs, a gramophone, a red door, drawings, doll-like ghosts ("doll girls" in the credits) are the materials out of which Wan creates that very distinctive emotional resonance. No number of ghostly jump scares or scuttling demons could equal what he does with his montage of claws, sparks, and toys set to the tune of Tiny Tim's "Tiptoe through the Tulips" or his moody camera arcs up stairs and around buildings. Even as the film begins to weaken toward the climax, these moments punctuate and elevate the film with abstract beauty and mystery.

The weakest part of Insidious is the silly story from Leigh Whannel (who also plays one of the ghost hunters). But how that story fits its formula is in itself interesting and worthy of consideration. Films of this formula have tended to be about domesticity and the family unit in Western society. Any formula in a film genre does tend to address ideological concerns of some sort and this one addresses family. In Insidious, there is only one adult male in the picture. There are, however, several mother figures. Dalton's mother, Dalton's grandmother, the medium, and the old woman ghost. The only other character that could be construed as an adult male is the demon, described as a man with a fiery face. Of all the males in the film, the only one that could be considered a powerful male, or in any way 'alpha', is the demon. The dad is ineffectual and avoids confrontation until the film's climax. The wife runs the family and, as we find out, the grandmother has powerfully influenced her son's life. Her influence has created a man-child who is himself raising three children, two of whom are male.

So what we have in this family is a situation the reflects a contemporary society of feminized, domesticated men: men who frequently assume the role of house-husband and to whom any traditionally female task other than being pregnant is one to be shared. Of course, the situation is not only one of what tasks men do in the home, but an emotional climate of sensitive, mollycoddled boys raised with kidgloves to be wimpy, ineffectual men dominated by their wives.

(Spoilers in the following paragraph.)

The demon that threatens to overtake Dalton, then, seems to reflect a semi-conscious effort to reclaim classical masculinity, a powerful male force that creates its own laws. What threatens to break through and destroy the family unit is a return of the now untenable patriarchal order. What we expect from the father is to be powerful enough not to require that patriarchal order, to be able to resist it and return to a life of equality, now stronger than before. While the father does man up to rescue his son, the film's conclusion of the boy returning to his body, the father being taken over by the powerful old woman ghost, is clearly step in the wrong direction. The conclusion leaves us alarmed and dissatisfied, hoping for the female force to be oppressed and the strong male to return to do it.

(Spoilers end here.)

In the end, Insidious is a visually strong film hampered by a silly, overexplained story. Wan dreams up several inventive means of chilling the audience visually, but the dialogue pulls us back into the uncomfortable world of needless plot. The film nevertheless remains fascinating and worthy of at least one viewing to enjoy the ride and appreciate Wan's talents. With only a single, bloodless murder, the film is also as child-friendly as Joe Dante's Gremlins or The Hole.