It makes sense that James Wan would latch onto Kane Parsons, recently serving as producer on Parsons' film adaptation of his cult web series Backrooms. Long before horror fans became obsessed with liminal spaces, Wan was exploring just such an idea through his Insidious franchise. The series features its own liminal realm, known as "The Further," a sort of demonic buffer zone between this world and the next. Practically every entry in the series climaxes with someone entering The Further to defeat some form of evil, but it never really took advantage of the eeriness of liminal spaces.
As producer on this sixth entry, Wan clearly gave writer/director Jacob Chase a brief to double down on the liminal space shtick. What makes Backrooms and its ilk so unsettling is the idea of somewhere that looks like the everyday world, but something is slightly off. We get that to a degree here, making for some effective sequences, until the movie devolves into the usual overblown climax of flashing lights and screaming protagonists.
This one opens with a flashback to a seemingly mental ill woman taking her own life, leaving a young daughter behind. 20 years later the girl is now a single mother herself. Gemma (Amelia Eve) works as a dental hygienist, is dating a hunky cop (Brandon Perea), and has inherited her late mother's home, into which she has recently moved with her nine-year-old daughter Maya (Island Austin).
In the home, Gemma begins to have disturbing nightmares and hallucinations. She discovers that she has the ability to enter The Further while in a sleeping state. Not only that, but she can bring objects back into the real world. This attracts the attention of a demon, Cyrus Lam (Sam Spruell), who plans to exploit Gemma's ability and unleash his kind into our world. Teaming up with series heroine Elise Rainier (Lin Shaye), who is now a permanent resident of The Further, Gemma attempts to thwart Cyrus.
The first half of this latest instalment does enough to suggest there might be some life left in a franchise that has been running on fumes for the past decade. Chase fashions some interesting set-pieces, the highlight involving a furniture fort that transforms into a claustrophobic liminal space. There is a clever sequence that subverts our fears of visiting the dentist by making Gemma the one who is freaked out when a ghoul with a mouth full of rotting teeth visits her clinic for a toe-curling check-up.
But as we've come to expect from this series, the movie runs out of ideas and settles into yet another overlong climax that is essentially a cross between the end of Poltergeist and a bad Marvel movie. This one owes a lot to Nightmare on Elm Street, with Gemma taking the Nancy role of battling Cyrus (this movie's Freddy) on his own turf. The climax of Wes Craven's movie lasted no more than 10 minutes, whereas Out of the Further devotes its final 40 minutes to tediously dragging out its own derivative battle between the forces of good and evil. Still, audiences keep showing up for this series, so expect further journeys to the Further.
Directed by: Jacob Chase
Starring: Amelia Eve, Lin Shaye, Brandon Perea, Maisie Richardson-Sellers
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