Insidious' potential was lost in act 2.

Rating: 5/10 (10 August 2013)

James Wan's Insidious (2010) suffered from the same fate that, unfortunately, a lot of modern day original horror films suffer from; asking the audience to suspend their disbelief just a little too much.
The opening thirty minutes were promising, with the film seemingly setting up a solid group of questions that were worthy of answers: Whose kid is that? What's that creepy music? Is the mother imagining this? Why's the Dad never been caught in a photograph?
Unfortunately, Leigh Whannell's script never took us to what I felt would be appropriate answers to any of them with the Saw (2004) writer instead taking the film on a run through alternate universes and demon mythology wrapped in to one 'Daddy re-establishes himself as the centre of the home' piece which seemed entirely formulated and lacking in originality.
At its base, Insidious (2010) was always going to be a horror film that intended to make you jump from your seat and it did a pretty good job of presenting those moments. However, in asking its audience to believe that the child was lost in an alternate reality and that the only way to save him was for his Father (who could do the same thing) to go in after him and 'return him home' just seemed way too much of an almost instant widening of the audiences perception of reality and thus alienated the more logical viewer like myself. From that point on, I became disinterested and therefore not very afraid.
Perhaps that was my lack of imagination, or my vast disappointment that such a potentially great 21st century horror descended in to something I wasn't much of a fan of.
Either way, it failed to thrill me for 2/3's of its runtime despite acceptable presentation and such an intense and promising opening.