WRITING (Leigh Whannell): The start of this film is fantastic. It’s very ominous and eases us into the horror. You just have the one creepy looking guy who seems to be after the baby. But then it seemed that they completely abandoned that storyline and went for a “bigger” scary storyline featuring a demon. The story just gets worse and worse, abandoning the ominous nature and going toward a fast-paced story with a big demon. It does have great moments, such as the man behind the crib part, or the demon in the dining room part. But the bad, I feel, really outweighs the good here. And let’s not forget that this film ends on a cliffhanger. 4/10
PERFORMANCES (James Wan): Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne are the main focuses in this film and they’re fine. When I think of Patrick Wilson, I think of this film and ‘The Conjuring’. The kids were also fine. I feel like that’s all I can say about this cast, is that they’re just fine. They don’t elevate their characters and aren’t exceptional. Rose Byrne might be the best of the cast, giving us the most emotional performance of anyone. 7/10
CINEMATOGRAPHY (David M. Brewer/John R. Leonetti): A lot of the cinematography in this movie was used in tandem with the scares to build tension and suspense. So most of that is fine, but a lot of the camerawork felt wonky and awkward. The establishing shots, which were wide, panning crab moves, were too fast and made the establishing shots feel so weird. But with that, there are some great shots and excellent framing in this film. 8/10
EDITING (Kirk M. Morri/James Wan): I thought the editing of this film had mostly fine cutting, but there were some jarring moments for the cutting where, during dialogue, it would cut to a character for less than a second. But also, on the flipside, you have incredible moments of editing where the cutting would be used to reveal a scare or build tension. 7/10
VISUAL EFFECTS (Spypost): The effects for this film were mostly well-done practical effects that gave off a well-done, low budget feel. There was one bad moment of VFX toward the end, when the demon was crawling on the wall in the Further. It looked very bad and just completely CGI. 8/10
ENJOYMENT: I was really enjoying this movie until it went completely off the walls. It started using a lot more jump scares and it ditching the ominous tone made it feel more like a cop out than anything. Plus the cliffhanger ending was an eye-roll. 3/10
MUSICAL SCORE (Joseph Bishara): I actually really liked the score of this film. The utilization of the strings was creepy and worked really well with the imagery. 10/10
SOUND (Robert Cross): The sound design of this movie was lame when they started doing the cliche jump scare sound effects at every scare. When it was just the string sound effect, that was fine, it worked. But every time the cliche sound came, it felt dumb. It made 80% of the scares unenjoyable. 5/10
PRODUCTION DESIGN (Aaron Sims): The set design of this film was excellent and made the film more creepy in the way each set looked. The Further looked especially creepy, when the demon was watching over Josh and Dalton. Also, the design of the Demon was excellent, giving us a very creepy monster. 10/10
OVERALL: ‘Insidious’ is a film that has a great start but really falls off on its way to the end. It’s a gradual fall that can be blamed on the amount of jump scares, lazy writing, and bad sound design. It does have a lot of great aspects, though, that just needed a better script.
Marc Mifsud 