There’s a sound — a nearly imperceptible sigh — that my wife makes when a film displeases her. I’ve heard it, sitting next to her in quiet theaters and I know that I don’t even have to ask if she liked the movie.

During this film, I heard it more than a few times.

As someone who mainly loves either drive-in era movies, foreign horror or films out to test the audience’s gag reflex with a torrent of upsetting scenarios and body decimation, it took some time for me to begrudgingly respect the ghost and possession cycle of James Wan, starting with 2010’s Insidious, followed by 2013’s The Conjuring and then alternating each year or so between these franchises. Both of these series are marked by his quality eye for direction as well as some truly well-delivered art direction, something that’s lacking in so many modern horror movies.

But as it goes, franchises get stale. The Conjuring will hit nine movies this fall — and two shorts — while this is the fifth Insidious film. Created by Leigh Whannell (who also worked on Saw and Dead Silence with Wan and directed the underappreciated Upgrade), the first two films center on Josh and Renai Lambert (Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne) and their children Dalton, Foster and Cali. They’re, as usual in long franchises, the best in the overall series.

A review, for those that haven’t seen the film: Dalton encounters an entity in the attic of the family home and goes into a coma, but is truly trapped in a realm past life and death called The Beyond, err, The Further. That very same place nearly trapped Josh when he was a child, a fact that he learns from his mother Lorraine (Barbara Hershey), and required the help of psychic Elise Rainier (Lin Shaye). Now, she must come back, along with paranormal investigators Specs and Tucker (Whannell and Angus Sampson), and figure out how to rescue the Lambert family.

The events of this movie — and the second, which was predestined based on the shock ending of the original — run deep within every moment of this reimagining/sequel/restart of the franchise, the first film of the series in seven years.

Spoilers for everything after the trailer…

Directed by Wilson and written by Scott Teems — more on him in a bit — this movie opens on tragedy. Lorraine has died, Josh and Renai have divorced, Dalton (Ty Simpkins, who was played the role in the original, as is Andrew Astor as Foster) and his father are distant and it seems like Josh has spent the last few years in what he calls a fog. Even an attempt at connecting by driving Dalton to college fails.

While there, the young artist goes through a memory exercise in class and unlocks memories of The Further, drawing the red door at the entrance. Along with his roommate — by accident, she’s played by Sinclair Daniel and is accidentally placed in his dorm — he begins to investigate his ability to astral project and avoid ghosts at frat parties. There is a cute scene where both Specs, Tucker and Elaine all appear on YouTube.

Meanwhile, Josh attempts to discover why he’s felt like he’s lost most of his life. Between a CAT scan gone jump scare and a memory game — also gone jump scare — he finally has to go talk to his ex-wife and learn that he once menaced the entire family with a hammer while possessed by Michelle Crane, the Woman In White, as well as the Lipstick Demon.

Now, those same entities have trapped Dalton — cue the red room, start up “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” and start the fog — and father must save son.

The issue with this movie is in what you want it to be. Do you want closure for a family that has dealt with the paranormal and blocked it out of their lives until the act of forgetting it split them? Or do you want a scary film that takes ordinary people into the frightening unknown of The Further? This film series has always dealt with loss and grief and the missing spaces caused by those gone from our lives — Josh’s father, Elaine’s husband — but this goes further (pardon the pun) by spending nearly an hour in the miserable lives of a family that has failed to connect before it seemingly remembers that oh yes, this is also a possession movie.

Wilson does fine for a first-time director, but it’s a tough walk emulating the footprints of Wan. I watched the original right after we got home from the theater and it’s striking how much bigger and richer the first movie is. As for the script, well, Scott Teems has somehow gotten to write a Firestarter reboot, the excoriable Halloween Kills and is now set to write The Exorcist: Believer, all based on a few shorts and some TV work, as far as I can tell. The height of his wit is named a character Nick the Dick after a scene in Bachelor Party and really that’s the limit of creativity in a film that outright restages scenes from the second movie.

This is less a movie that is out to scare you as a summer thrill ride and more one that brings closure to a family constantly dealing with decades of missing people and trying to process grief. The film that it wants to be is not always compatible with the type of movie it is sold as. It needs defter hands to pull that off and instead, we are like the characters in The Further, wandering the fog for 90 minutes or so until the lights come on and we can finally go home.

PS: There was a man literally screaming out things while we watched this movie, frightened by almost every jump scare and he wasn’t joking. I hope that if you see this movie he’s in the audience with you, because he’s the best part of the film.