The Insidious franchise began in 2010 as a scrappy collision between James Wan’s love for old-school supernatural horror and Leigh Whannell’s taste for grubby genre silliness. Sixteen years since, Insidious: Out of the Further now features another new demon and a fresh opportunity to make the Further feel dangerous again. Jacob Chase, who previously directed Come Play, writes and directs this sixth film, which shifts attention away from the Lambert family toward Gemma (Amelia Eve), a single mother living with her daughter Maya (Island Austin) in the house where Gemma’s own mother died.For the unattuned, Wan and Whannell built the series around a spirit world called the Further, where dead souls and demons hang around waiting to ruin someone’s day. After five films, the early Lambert family’s story has mostly run its course, so Out of the Further starts fresh with Gemma. The film opens in the past, when a young Gemma watches her demented mother kill herself. We then jump to the present, where Gemma is raising her daughter Maya in the same house. The trouble, naturally, has followed her home. Insidious: Out of the Further (English)Director: Jacob ChaseCast: Amelia Eve, Brandon Perea and Maisie Richardson-Sellers, Lin Shaye, Sam Spruell, Joseph BisharaRuntime: 106 minutesStoryline: Gemma is a young mother who discovers she can travel into the Further, a purgatorial realm of lost soulsDespite the Blumhouse-Atomic Monster pedigree, you probably shouldn’t be walking into the sixth Insidious expecting something as finely calibrated as Obsession or Backrooms. Unsurprisingly, plot and personality in this latest franchise outing has been granted the minimum operating budget required to get us from one scare to the next. Much of the film is drenched in that familiar silver-blue grading and persistent ‘Further Fog’, flattening every frame with the same refrigerated gloom. It also keeps piling on indicators that something terrible is happening, leaving the imagery with very little mystery to do any work.Out of the Further does occasionally strike gold with some ingenious set pieces, especially when Gemma crawls into Maya’s pillow fort and discovers that the thing has somehow become much bigger on the inside. The cushions open into a long, beige maze that turns the cosy hideout into a surprisingly nasty little nightmare. There’s a Backrooms flavour to these endless upholstered passages and the sequence feels inspired by that one terrifying wall cavity sequence in Damian McCarthy’s Caveat, though the gag remains quintessentially Insidious. Chase understands the claustrophobic value of spatial disorientation here, but it’s a combination the rest of the film simply cannot manufacture.