A Huge Disappointment

Rating: 4/10 (9 April 2011)

Insidious confuses me. Not because of the plot, which is endlessly spelled out by exposition-spewing secondary characters and is all shamelessly lifted from better movies anyway. I'm confused as to how so many people like it. A 7.4 on the IMDb, a "Fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and people proclaiming it's the scariest thing they've ever seen... has everyone been taking drugs? Have they forgotten all other horror movies exist? I know I'm not alone in this. Everyone in the theater with me disliked the film. Four girls walked out partway through, people were laughing at the "scary" bits and cracking jokes, and when the credits started rolling, I loudly proclaimed, "Well, that sucked." The crowd laughed in agreement. So what happened? Was my theater somehow screening a different cut of the movie? Is everyone else living in an alternate dimension where this is a good movie? I have no idea.
Now onto the plot. A family has just moved into a big, creepy old house. One of the kids falls into a supernatural coma, because his spirit is trapped in the realm of the dead, and the mother starts seeing visions of ghosts. The dad is skeptical at first, but eventually cannot deny the truth. They move, but it's the person who's haunted - actually stalked by a demon trying to possess him - and not the house. They call in an old lady and her goofy team of supernatural tech experts to bring the kid's soul back into the real world. What's that, you say? It sounds exactly like a sloppy cross between Poltergeist and Paranormal Activity? Well, yes, that's because it is.
Nothing happens in this movie that isn't incredibly predictable. That might be okay if it were done better than most other movies, but it isn't - the apparitions are often more goofy than scary, there's too much comedic relief, dialogue is simplistic and far too expository, and the acting never rises above mediocre (and is usually somewhat short of that mark).
Near the beginning of the film, it's shown that family life is tense. The parents have three kids, and the father, a schoolteacher, has been staying at work late every night with flimsy excuses. That plot point is mentioned once or twice, then completely abandoned. The two kids who still have souls in their bodies, a baby girl and young boy, almost completely disappear from the movie at the halfway point and never amount to anything. We learn that our female lead is a songwriter near the beginning, which is really the only characterization we get, and also goes nowhere other than the standard "mysteriously moved object" scene with some of her sheet music. In fact, the entire film is almost completely devoid of character development.
There are some plot points that carry over, but this is actually another problem. The movie thinks it's much more clever than it actually is, and also assumes the audience is full of idiots. It uses the tried-and-true device of kids drawing out their nightmares, and almost every single time we see what inspired the drawing, the movie cuts back to that picture in case we forgot about it already.
There's also a subplot involving a previous possession attempt on another character by a different spirit, which is clumsily introduced with more over-expository dialogue and of course leads into the telegraphed "twist" ending. This subplot also makes heavy use of the "spirit photography" element, and feels a lot like Shutter or parts of The Omen.
There's even a trek into the otherworld in which a character is sidetracked from his goal when he discovers the origin of two smiling, murdered female ghosts who have no real relevance to the plot other than to serve as a sloppy and unnecessary allusion to The Shining. It's implied they may have been killed in the house that the family moved into at the beginning of the film, but this is not at all important to any occurrence in the movie's story.
These girl ghosts are joined by two other standard ghost types who are highlighted amongst all the inhabitants of the netherworld for no apparent reason: the creepy guy with a disgustingly malformed tongue and mouth who is required to attempt kissing a character at some point, and the playful, annoying, goofy and unscary little kid spirit who's obligated to play "hide and seek" with a victim.
Occasionally, something scary will happen - a few scenes build reasonable suspense and there are several cheap jumps, but these don't override the failings of the film as a whole.
Maybe people liked it simply because it reminded them of some of their favorite older horror movies. I'm of the mind that references don't work unless the movie they're in is good on its own, and I didn't find this to be a good movie. It wasn't even bad enough to be fun - just 103 minutes of generic, disappointing, and uninspired horror tropes. I suppose I'm happy for all the people who like it; I certainly wish I'd enjoyed it as much as they did. But I can't say I see the value in this movie. I didn't think it was OFFENSIVELY bad, so perhaps you should take a chance on it since so many others think it's great. Just don't be surprised if you walk away feeling like you wasted your time.