20 Great Horror Roles Ruined By Terrible Acting
16. Insidious - Josh Lambert
These days, Patrick Wilson is something of a Scream King, with him having performed in many different horror movies over the years. 2010's Insidious was the beginning of this, and it was significant that Wilson's directional debut was the franchise's fifth film, Insidious: The Red Door.
The irony, then, is that Wilson's quite weak in the original Insidious. He's a terrific actor, and he's done good work in the other sequels as well as in the Conjuring films, so this is a rather surprising case. Throughout the picture, he just seems adrift, and unlike co-lead Rose Byrne, who plays his wife, Wilson never properly conveys the trauma of the family's situation.
They're being haunted and their son Dalton (Ty Simpkins) has fallen into a mysterious coma, but there isn't much desperation or pathos in Patrick Wilson's performance. If anything, he just seems quite chill, which definitely isn't believable. Once again, this is an outlier rather than any true representation of his acting gifts, but this definitely doesn't rank among Wilson's better performances.
No word of a lie: he arguably gave a better performance in Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, the absolutely disastrous final film in the mostly catastrophic DCEU. That really says it all.