Watched the U.S.A.'s 2023 Insidious: The Red Door (1:46:17). Josh Lambert and his son Dalton undergo hypnosis to repress one entire year from their lives. Nine years later, Dalton enrolls in an art course and is off to college. His teacher, Professor Armagan, encourages her students to delve into their subconscious to create works of art--and Dalton does so, painting a mysterious, red door that intrigues him. At the same time, Josh has unpleasant flashes from his past. Father and son work together to uncover the truth about the forgotten year in their lives and resolve issues buried deep within their selves.
This is one horror movie produced in the U.S.A. that has closure and has a satisfying ending. On the downside, it is as Freudian as American horror movies get, exploiting the usual family dysfunctions and elevating them from neuroses to psychoses.
The movie's dramatic situation is that of the 2004 The Day After Tomorrow, in which a father goes through hell and high water in order to rescue his son from disaster. There is the usual, token black performer, and there are too many jumbled and often unrelated dream images for so simple a narrative.
Kudos, though, to an American movie that manages its way from beginning to end without nudity, without sex, and without cuss words. But this movie's greatest success is in portraying how meet-ups are possible in the astral realm against the odds of time and space, and the clever merging of time zones. Those art class scenes were also quite precious--evidently the writers and director are very much familiar with the lessons of Timon Nicolaides.
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