#patrick curtis

You know, if you took all the illogical supernatural crap out of Patrick Wilson’s INSIDIOUS: THE RED DOOR (2023, Hulu) you’d have a half-decent film about sons dealing with their fathers’ mental illness. First-time director Wilson knows how to place and when to move the camera and generates suspense well. But the script, by Scott Teems from a story by Teems and Leigh Whannell, keeps getting in the way. As well as Wilson shoots the supernatural scenes, he can’t quite get around the fact that they don’t have very consistent rules. But when he’s got a family scene that he can mine for some resonance, he really takes off, and I was surprised at how moved I often was.

The film opens repeating the end of INSIDIOUS 2 (2013), with Wilson and elder son Dalton (Ty Simpkins) being hypnotized to forget the events of the first two films. It then picks up nine years later at the funeral of Wilson’s mother (Barbara Hershey, and her absence was almost enough to send me looking for another film). Wilson and Simpkins are now suffering from PTSD. The marriage is over, and he’s been rather an absentee dad. Simpkins is having flashbacks to the year he’s forgotten, when his possessed father tried to kill the family. And Wilson is coping with bitterness over a father who seemingly deserted him. So, he tries to patch things up with Simpkins by driving him to his first year at college. That doesn’t go well (in one of the most weakly written scenes in the film, so bad Wilson the director can’t figure out what to do with it). Then they start astral projecting and being visited by all manner of critters, and the whole thing just goes all woo-woo. It also gets rather draggy. It takes forever for father and son to figure out what’s going on, so the supernatural scenes start repeating themselves. It’s like the ghosts are yelling, “Don’t you get the point! Let me try again!”

Hypernormalization