At the end of the first film, Josh (Patrick Wilson) brought his son back from the otherworld, but he couldn’t find his way back – his body was taken over by a ghostly entity. The spirit is happy to feel alive again and wants only one thing – to live like ordinary people, but strange things start happening again in the Lambert’s house, and the people around Josh begin to suspect that something is wrong with him.
Two years passed between the first and second films because producer Jason Blum was waiting for director James Wan and screenwriter Leigh Whannell – he only wanted to make a sequel with their participation.
Some short-sighted critics once explained the box office success of “Saw” by its brutal violence – in fact, it was “Saw” that introduced the term “torture porn” into the lexicon. But James Wan made a clever move, and instead of developing the success in its sequels, he launched another franchise, in some ways the direct opposite of “Saw.” “Insidious” is also a horror film, but almost completely “bloodless,” which allowed it to receive a very mild PG-13 age rating in theaters, ensuring its outstanding box office receipts. With “Insidious 2,” Wan is set to end his career in horror films to switch to other cinema (his next film will be “Furious 7”), and this is a kind of summing up of a long period in the director’s life – a kind of thesis on the topic “What I have learned in ten years from ‘Saw’ to ‘Insidious 2’.”
The budget of “Insidious 2” was more than three times the cost of the original film, but on the first day of release, the sequel completely paid for itself twice over.
James Wan’s Mastery of Horror
Wan has learned a lot, to his credit. Few people in modern genre Hollywood work as confidently and consciously with scene composition, camera, and sound as Wan – he builds mise-en-scènes impeccably, and even commonplace techniques (reflection in the mirror!) don’t irritate in his performance. Especially impressive are the seemingly banal scenes in which the characters wander around the house – we see a little more than they do, but at the same time, we are led by the hand, constantly, incessantly fueling the characters’ fear. The “boo” moments, without which such a film is impossible, even serve as a kind of release – well, thank God, the chilling horror of waiting is finally over!
A Complex and Frightening Sequel
It’s nice to see that Wan didn’t abandon the complex ending of the first film and continued the story from where it left off. The sequel’s script turned out to be more “cumbersome,” but there is no feeling of overdose – the authors divided the characters into several groups and gave each their own line. As a result, someone is digging into the secrets of Josh’s past, someone is trying to call on the ghost of Elise (Lin Shaye), who died in the first film, and Josh’s wife (Rose Byrne) just dreams of not going crazy in a house that now seems to never sleep. The narrative constantly switches from one group to another, while Wan achieves an amazing effect – the plot does not stand still for a minute, but moves forward exclusively with “scary” scenes.
A Superior Horror Experience
Despite the fact that there is nothing original in each of these lines separately, “Insidious 2” is better than its predecessor – it is more exciting, more balanced, more technically refined, and certainly many times scarier (and it also has no ridiculous horned devils). In general, armed with this film, you can write accusatory manifestos to the rating committee – there is something deeply wrong with the fact that censors slap adult R ratings on toothless horror films with a couple of naturalistic scenes, but issue a PG-13 label to a horror film that does without blood and guts, but can easily make even an adult stutter.