It sounds like the start of a joke: Did you know that the guys who created the hard-R "Saw" franchise - director James Wan and writer Leigh Whannell - made a PG-13 movie?
No, really, the guys for whom the phrase "torture porn" was coined are making a movie that doesn't rely on grated flesh.
I'm not kidding. Where are you going? Come back!
On second thought, you're not missing much.
Rose Byrne and Patrick Wilson are a young couple moving into a new house - Byrne spends the first few scenes unpacking, dropping a huge hint on where the story is going. I think this is the filmmakers' idea of playing fair with the audience, but it just feels cheap.
The parents have three children - a baby who won't stop crying and two other small boys. Byrne, a stay-at-home mom who wants to work on her music, starts noticing the usual haunted house things - moving books, loud doors, a genuinely disconcerting sound on the baby monitor.
After exploring in the attic, one son falls into a coma that doctors insist is not really a coma, but … something else!
When Barbara Hershey - only slightly less creepy than in her amazing turn in "Black Swan" - stops in as Wilson's mother, she reiterates the earlier hints and starts trying to help out.
As Byrne's visions of ghosts and goblins persist, she starts to lose it, insisting that they move out of the house. When the same things continue in a new place, they call in some ghostbuster-types whose attempts at comic relief result in a baffling tonal shift. Hitchcock, Wan is not.
Just check out how every jump-scare is punctuated by a blast from the score. You don't startle because of the image; you jump because a bomb might have gone off a few seats down.
By the time the ghostbusters' boss (Lin Shaye) arrives as the exposition fairy with an explanation she does her level best to deliver straight, you start to regard the child's unconsciousness with jealousy.
Over and over, "Insidious" confuses classic with cliché. The most obvious antecedent for "Insidious" is "Poltergeist," but where that movie, in classic Spielberg fashion, felt as much a suburban family drama that happened to involve supernatural horror, "Insidious" doesn't bother developing any of the characters or themes.
These people aren't people, they're ciphers, which is fine, I suppose, if they are just meat for the grinder, as in the "Saw" movies. But if you can't rely on gore, however allegedly allegorical, you have to have a story that stands up on its own.
Back to the sawing board, folks.
"Insidious"
Our grade: C
Genre: Horror
Running Time: 101 min
MPAA rating: PG-13
Release Date: Apr 1, 2011
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