by Joe Friar, Fort Worth Report
August 22, 2026
In the spirit of William Castle, a free toothbrush and floss kit should come with every ticket sold for “Insidious: Out of the Further,” the sixth film in the horror franchise. Amelia Eve plays a dental hygienist who battles a dead cult leader (Sam Spruell) who dresses like the singer of a goth band (probably named Gingivitus). Reliable Lin Shaye returns as Elise Rainer to Further-assist our protagonist, who must protect her young daughter (Island Austin) from the demons lurking behind the red door in the film written and directed by Jacob Chase.
In 1976’s “Marathon Man,” a distance runner (Dustin Hoffman) is tortured by a Nazi dentist played by Laurence Olivier, who asks, “Is it safe?” before grinding into healthy teeth in the grueling scene. Yes, it’s hard to watch, but I winced even more when dental hygienist Gemma (Eve) began examining an elderly patient (David Morgan) in “Out of The Further” who had just come from an all-you-can-eat buffet housed in a hair salon. The mouth-vision POV heightens the gross-out horror created by Adam Johansen (“Evil Dead Rise”) and the practical effects team.
Gemma blacks out, waking in The Further, where she’s rescued by the spirit of psychic medium Elise, who died in the first film, before a demonic dentist can recreate the “Marathon Man” moment. A backstory reveals that, as a young child, Gemma watched her single mom, Ingrid (Laura Gordon), perish at the hands of the demonic cult leader Cyrus Lam (Spruell), who took voice-projection lessons from Candyman (we miss you, Tony Todd).
Cyrus was after Ingrid because she was a “Courier”—a person able to transport objects and entities in and out of The Further—a gift passed down to Gemma and her daughter, Maya (Austin). The cult leader’s plan was to use her to escape The Further, bringing an army of the dead with him to rule our world. Now that she’s out of the picture, Cyrus has shifted his focus to Gemma and her daughter.
With Elise’s guidance, Gemma enlists the help of a psychic tattoo artist named Claire (Maisie Richardson-Sellers), who can channel Elise for 5 minutes at a time. A plan is formulated to stop Cyrus from crossing over into the material plane. First, they must stop the cult leader’s Acolytes, two elderly women and a man, who are Cyrus’s three surviving human followers who help the cult leader bridge the gap between the two worlds.
The supporting cast includes Brandon Perea as Gemma’s cop boyfriend Nick, who is way too eager to sidestep the law, adhering instead to paranormal protocol. Somebody get him a Diablo sandwich and a Dr. Pepper and make it fast!
Chase delivers a couple of effective jump scares early on, setting the horror in motion. Another tense moment comes when Gemma ventures into a pillow fort, but as the setting begins to shift between the two worlds, the scares are diluted, and the film becomes tedious. The formula that James Wan and Leigh Whannell perfected has reached its expiration date. The face of horror has shifted as audiences have grown more discerning. After “Backrooms,” “Obsession,” and “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” it’s hard to get into a franchise that relies on a 16-year-old formula to generate excitement.
(2 stars)
Now showing in theaters
This article first appeared on Fort Worth Report and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.