Years after the haunting of the Lambert family, the red-faced demon is no longer confined to “The Further.” Something has changed. Psychic doors have opened across the globe, and dark entities begin bleeding into the waking world in scattered, mysterious cases. A new protagonist, Ava Monroe, a grief counselor with a tragic past, is drawn into a terrifying mystery when one of her young patients begins speaking in the voice of Ava’s long-dead sister—who supposedly took her own life decades earlier.

When Ava begins seeing shadowy figures around her home, experiencing time lapses, and uncovering strange markings in her dreams, she seeks help from those who understand the paranormal. She’s connected to Specs and Tucker, the ghost-hunting duo now working as freelance investigators after Elise Rainier’s passing. Skeptical but desperate, Ava joins them to explore the haunting further and to confront the possibility that her sister never died—at least, not in the way she was told.

Their journey leads them into an abandoned psychiatric hospital where the walls still echo with cries of past patients—some of whom were unknowingly trapped in The Further. As Ava and the team delve deeper, they discover the institution was a site of forbidden experiments on astral projection, intended to bridge the gap between life and death. These experiments inadvertently tore open a permanent door to The Further, and the red-faced demon has been feeding, evolving, and preparing to enter the living world fully.

In terrifying dream sequences, Ava must confront her worst memories and hidden guilt, forced to re-live the night her sister died. In doing so, she opens a direct portal into The Further, where the lines between memory, spirit, and nightmare collapse. There, she learns that her sister’s soul is being kept as bait—a trap for Ava, who unknowingly has the same gift Elise once had: the ability to close doors in The Further permanently.

The climax unfolds across both realities, with Ava’s body possessed in the waking world while her spirit battles through nightmarish versions of the hospital and her childhood home. With time slipping and her allies in danger, she makes the ultimate sacrifice—trapping herself in The Further to seal the breach and save the others. The portal collapses, but Ava is gone.

The film ends ambiguously. A young girl Ava once counseled draws a picture: a woman in red, smiling behind a black veil. Ava’s voice echoes faintly: “Sometimes, to close a door, you have to walk through it first.” The camera pulls back slowly as we hear a creaking sound… another door opening.