“I don't think bad wiring is the problem here.”
Just so we have all biases up front: I’m not a fan of James Wan. We have him to blame for the execrable and seemingly never-ending series of Saw films from the aughts, and I’m still attempting to see what the fuss was about The Conjuring. Now that we have that admission out of the way, this is by far the most impressed I’ve ever been with Wan. Insidious marries what I did enjoy about The Conjuring (deliberate pacing, slow and twisting camera pans, solid acting, an utter lack of fake scares) with a far more compelling story. Poltergeist is the obvious antecedent for the story, although Wan does play slightly with the formula. Unfortunately, some of those attempts at originality fall flat – Poltergeist studiously refused to give us a concrete glimpse of the netherworld, whereas Wan spends the bulk of his third act wandering around the “Further.” It’s what you don’t show us that’s infinitely scarier and despite some nice set design, this vision of the afterlife is distressingly, well, wan. Storywise, the film’s impact is also blunted by the complete disappearance in the back half of the Lambert family’s children, who are so crucial to engendering sympathy in the film’s beginning. The baby daughter, in particular, acts as a canary in the coalmine for the supernatural and her wailing cries constantly keep you on edge. By emphasizing them so much in the beginning, only to drop them, creates a curious emotional vacuum once the film kicks into overdrive. It results in a film that’s technically proficient, visually engaging, but also curiously lacking warm blood in its veins.
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