Xixax Film Forum

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Trailer here. (http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1810177205/trailer)

Release Date: April 1st, 2011 (wide)

Starring: Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne 

Directed by: James Wan 

Premise: Shortly after moving, a family discovers that dark spirits have possessed their home and that their son has inexplicably fallen into a coma. Trying to escape the haunting and save their son, they move again only to discover that it was not their house that was haunted.

from my blog (http://modage.tumblr.com/post/4234032249/insidious-review):

"Insidious" is the latest film from James Wan and Leigh Whannell, the duo responsible for the original "Saw" film almost a decade ago (but not for it's countless sequels). That film has been extremely influential in the horror genre for the last decade, bringing on more extreme levels of violence and prompting the label (that I hate) "torture porn." This film is almost a complete 180° for them, abandoning not only the violence and tone of those films but also the MTV-style quick editing and deeply saturated cinematography that quickly dated itself. It's a complete reinvention for them and the PG-13 film shares more in common with another film, "Paranormal Activity" (the director Oren Peli is a producer here). It collaboration turns out to be just as strange as it seems.

Anyone who's ever seen a haunted house movie before knows the beats. But there comes a moment midway through the film when the creaky doors and suspicious sounds become something more concrete and you're shouting at the screen "Move out of the fucking house, already!" Which usually takes the characters another 40 minutes or so to figure out. "Insidious" is one of the few films clever enough to figure out a way around this, 40 minutes into the film when things start to get a little too weird the characters do move out of the house and it turns out it's not the house that's been haunted, it's their son. It's actually a pretty ingenious little idea for a horror movie, you can move houses, but can't just leave your son. And for the first hour or so the film manages something that few horror films can, it's effectively scary.

Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne play the young married couple moving into a new house who find out their son may about to be possessed by some kind of evil. The pair never quite seem like a real married couple in their simple interactions which probably weakens any investment in their relationship. Even with it's dramatic issues, the first half was actually extremely tense capitalizing on the rule that your imagination can always come up with something scarier than they could ever show you. As the film goes on, the quick glimpses turn into sustained looks at the spirits in the film and the film becomes as silly as a stroll through a haunted house at an amusement park.

The film, which was a surprise hit at the Toronto Film Festival last year, is pretty clearly an homage to "Poltergeist" probably hoping to score audiences who flocked to "Paranormal Activity" and are too young to remember that 80s classic. Unfortunately it makes some serious missteps in the second half showing way more than necessary and effectively killing all the tension built up during the effective first act.