107 min | PG-13 | July 7, 2023 | Screen Gems
Josh and Dalton Lambert buried their memories of the astral plane years ago. Dalton heads off to art college and starts painting the things he was made to forget. Some doors stay shut for a reason, and this one creaks open on schedule.
Josh Lambert and his son Dalton had their memories of the Further hypnotically erased a decade ago. Now Dalton leaves for college and Josh navigates a divorce. The repressed material comes back through Dalton’s figure-drawing class, where he paints a red door he should not remember. The film positions itself as a story about a father and son confronting buried trauma and the inheritance of fear. It wants to close out the Lambert saga on an emotional note about men who refuse to talk about their pain.
Patrick Wilson plays Josh as a man hollowed out by what he cannot remember. He is best in the quiet scenes where the absence of memory reads as low-grade dread. Ty Simpkins plays Dalton with the sullen distance of a kid who blames his father for the silence between them. Their scenes together carry the only real weight the film has. Rose Byrne returns as Renai and gets almost nothing to do beyond worried phone calls. Sinclair Daniel plays Dalton’s roommate Chris with a loose comic energy that the script never figures out how to use.
Wilson directs his first feature, working from Scott Teems’s screenplay and a story by Leigh Whannell. He shoots the Further as a wash of red and black fog that drains the location of any specific geography. The jump scares arrive on a metronome. Wilson builds a quiet frame, holds it past comfort, then detonates a face and a music sting in the same beat, over and over until the rhythm becomes the whole grammar of the film. The MRI sequence is the one inventive setup, using the machine’s clatter to mask the approach of a figure in the dark.
This is a horror film that confuses repression as a theme with repression as a technique. The father-son material is sincere and occasionally lands. The scares are recycled from four prior films and arrive without escalation. Wilson the actor gives more than Wilson the director knows how to shape. The result is a competent goodbye to a franchise that ran out of new rooms several doors ago.