Fridae

The best way to see Insidious is a parody of David Lynch or as a masterpiece of Seussian nonsense in the guise of a horror film. I say this because this is one of those horror movies that keeps going on and on into an excursion of the plain weird to the point it dissolves into the nonsensical - while never reaching the depths of horror.

Consider the scenario: After an overlong and rather unpleasant opening credits punctuated by screeching violins imitating Robert Englund scratching a blackboard, Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne play Josh and Renai, a young couple saddled with their three children, and they have just moved into a new house. We gather that Renai wants to work on her music while being a housewife, and that Josh is a grade school teacher, and that both of them have had some difficulty in their marriage. Then after a series of mishaps, their elder son Dalton (Ty Simpkins) falls into a coma - following which various specters start appearing around the house.

It is here that the film gradually loses its power to scare beyond the initial “Boo!” The key to horror, just as it is to comedy, is timing and appropriateness. Botch either part and your story degenerates into absurdism. And that’s precisely where director James Wan and screenwriter Leigh Whannell pretty much misfire: their timing is just that wee bit off, and the atmosphere is just that wee bit inappropriately constructed.

Consider the weird incoherence in their selection of ghouls that echo a Dr Seuss book’s selection of creatures and are yet surprisingly mundane in the imagery: there’s a long-haired guy who resembles a homeless junkie/flasher, various people that seem to have stepped out of Tim Burton’s vision of the 1930s, a demon that bears more than a passing resemblance to Star Wars villain Darth Maul (no kidding), and an old woman resembling Miss Havisham from Great Expectations. Even 1970s retro crooner Tiny Tim’s falsetto cover of “Tiptoe through the Tulips” gets in on the act. Seuss’s Cat in the Hat wouldn’t look out of place if he popped up with Things 1 and 2, and served up a meal of Green Eggs and Ham.

It trips even more into laughs, intended or not, when the experts hired to combat these supernatural menaces include Lin Shaye as a medium with a bleached blonde Hillary Clinton hairdo, and her geeky assistants who dress like Mormons (Leigh Whannell and Angus Sampson) auditioning for the next Ghostbusters sequel. You almost expect Ray Parker Jr’s signature tune on the soundtrack when they appear. Turns out that Dalton is not in a coma but trapped instead in a realm called The Further, and he must be rescued before the Demon takes his soul forever.

By this point the film has reached the depths of the absurd, and never returns to horror again. Not that the rest of the film didn’t prepare us for it. It’s not just the unintentionally funny designs of the ghouls that loses the film’s fright, but the fact also that the characters are underwritten and not very believable. Patrick Wilson is basically a Poor Man’s Kevin Costner, and Rose Byrne, who can be brilliant when she needs to hold it in and deadpan her way through a situation (check out the little-seen Canadian dark comedy Just Buried in which she played a devious mortician), both play characters who seem to act against their interests just so that a lazy screenwriter can advance the plot with greater ease. The nonsensical plot details do not help, and distract from the story’s core which does contain the germ for a frightening thought: that of being so close, and yet so far, from saving someone you love.

There’s a thin line between nonsense and horror, and this movie never crosses it. I have never been a big fan of director James Wan, who seems to build his genre films around ideas that he shows a mixed record of executing, and this is a clear case where he disappoints. Insidious does not live up to its title: it’s an obvious, trite piece of cartoon absurdism that with should have just been played with a little less subtlety, and filmed as a straight-up comedy that would have made the late Dr Seuss proud.