Written by Sofia Mongillo Bermejo

Insidious: Out of the Further begins with a memory.

As a child, Gemma watches her mother deteriorate until the roles between them begin to reverse. She becomes her mother’s caretaker, even as she grows increasingly afraid of the woman she once relied on. It's sad and dark, and at first, it seems like we're watching a story about a child growing up in the shadow of a parent's mental illness.

Eventually, we realize we had it wrong.

Years later, Gemma is a mother herself, living with her young daughter in the home she inherited from her family and working at a dentist's office. Strange things begin happening around her, and as she starts experiencing some of what her mother did, another possibility emerges.

It's a familiar setup for a horror movie, but Out of the Further finds a surprisingly fresh way into it.

Take the pillow fort.

What starts as an innocent structure in the middle of a living room turns into one of the movie's best scares. The fort seems to stretch longer and longer, until Gemma can't find her way back out. Entities lurk around the corners, and suddenly this tiny space becomes endless. There is something especially unsettling about getting lost somewhere that shouldn't be possible to get lost in. It's a little Backrooms, a little Labyrinth, except the maze begins in your own living room.

It's one of the scariest sequences here, and I found myself hoping it would come up again.

The dentist's office gets its own version of that reversal.

Most people already understand the basic fear of sitting in a dentist's chair. Someone is leaning over you with metal instruments, asking you to keep your mouth open while they poke around inside it. Out of the Further takes that discomfort and flips the perspective. This time, the dentist is the one in danger.

Teeth become a recurring source of horror throughout the movie, along with mouths, tools and all the textures that make you instinctively cringe. There's a scene where Gemma is examining a patient when things take a very unsettling turn as she reaches into his mouth. I won't say much more than that.

The real horror, though, is inherited.

Gemma has spent years angry at her mother, convinced that she left her, and yet she can't bring herself to get rid of her things. Her mother's belongings still clutter the basement, a physical reminder of someone she insists she wants nothing to do with. At the same time, she is determined to give her daughter the childhood she never had, even as the fear of becoming her mother begins to creep in.

The familiar “woman sees something nobody else believes” trope gets a fresh spin. Gemma isn't simply dismissed as crazy. There is proof, people believe her, and she gets help. More importantly, it gives her a chance to question the story she's carried about her mother all these years. It's a small shift, but it changes everything we thought we knew about what happened to her.

What she thought was illness may have been something else entirely.

Amelia Eve

gives the protagonist a convincing performance without turning the movie into a showcase for one. The cast is solid without anyone particularly standing out, but Eve gives the mother-daughter relationship enough weight to carry the emotional side of the story, particularly as Gemma's fear of becoming her mother starts to take hold. Lin Shaye also makes her return to the Insidious universe, which will undoubtedly get a reaction from longtime fans. Her presence is fun in the moment, but the character feels underwritten, and some of her dialogue lands on the cheesy side. It feels like the movie knows what her appearance means to Insidious fans more than it knows what to do with her once she's there.

Where it slips

is in the final stretch. After finding some genuinely inventive ways to scare you, the movie eventually settles into a more conventional Insidious ending. It's a little cliché, and the emotional resolution arrives in a fairly neat package. It's also feel-good in a way I didn't mind. After spending so much time watching a daughter struggle with the story she was told about her mother, there is something

satisfying about finally letting her understand what really happened. The ending brings the mother-daughter story full circle, even if the horror itself doesn't land quite as strongly by the time it gets there.

For a franchise built around what gets passed between worlds, it turns out the scariest things can be the ones we pass down to each other.

And, because this is Insidious, the door is left open just enough for something else to come through.