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Download Insidious: Chapter 2) Wan and Whannell once again spin a ripping good ghost story here, populated by lots of restless spirits who ended their time among the living badly, a mother only Norman Bates could love, and a lyrical bit of time travel borrowed from Proust. They’re terrific pastiche artists, freely raiding our collective storehouse of horror-movie memories and arranging them in fresh, unexpected ways. Even their own work is up for grabs, since “The Conjuring” in many ways resembled a period inversion of “Insidious,” with Wilson as ghost hunter rather than hunted. But where so many sequels seem like mere remakes of their predecessors, with bigger budgets and less imagination, “Insidious” Chapter 2” feels like a genuine continuation of characters we enjoyed getting to know the first time around, and wouldn’t at all mind returning to again.
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Download Insidious: Chapter 2) If Wan is better than most genre directors when it comes to actors, he’s even better with mysteriously possessed inanimate objects, bringing the audience’s neck hair to attention with each creaking doorjamb, swaying chandelier and squawking transistor radio. He understands the innately creepy value of antiques — objects that we know were quite literally touched by the dead — and anything associated with childhood, that other irrecoverable past. Here, that simplest feat of sandbox engineering, a tin-can telephone, becomes perhaps the movie’s most accursed object — and something of a metaphor for Wan’s joyously analog thrill-making in the digital era.
