THE CELLAR (2022)

Studio:     Shudder/RLJE Films
Director:    Brendan Muldowney
Writer:     Brendan Muldowney
Producer:  Conor Barry, Richard Bolger, Benoit Roland
Stars:     Elisha Cuthbert, Eoin Macken, Abby Fitz, Dylan Fitzmaurice-Brady

Review Score:

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Summary:

After her teenage daughter mysteriously disappears, a mother discovers her family’s new house may hide a portal to another dimension.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Keira and Brian Woods move into an Irish manor known as ‘The Xaos House’ with their young son Steven and moody teenage daughter Ellie. While home alone, the siblings play on old phonograph record of John Fetherston, an eccentric academic who built the house, reciting a strange mathematical equation that includes Greek letters.

Ellie calls her mother when the power goes out. Despite her daughter’s fear of the dark, Keira instructs Ellie to count her way down the ten steps to the cellar to check the breaker. Over the phone, Keira hears Ellie become seemingly entranced as she continues counting steps even after she reaches ten.

Keira and Brian return home to find Ellie missing. When a search of the surrounding woods turns up nothing, Detective Brophy discovers instances of bullying on Ellie’s social media and concludes she ran away. Keira insists something strange happened in the cellar.

Keira finds the mathematical equation etched into the cellar’s stone floor. A black light reveals chlorophyll-based paintings of pained faces all over the cellar walls. Keira shows Brian that there are strange symbols above each door in the house. She also learns from Steven that the siblings played the old record on the night Ellie disappeared.

Keira calls Rob, the auctioneer who sold them the house, for information on the previous owner. Rob explains he only knows the owner was the daughter of the prominent academic who built the house, and he only ever dealt with her solicitor. Keira later begins researching John Fetherston and his family.

Keira asks her coworker Erica to decipher the symbols above the doors. Keira identifies them as Hebrew glyphs that spell “Leviathan,” a sea creature in Jewish mythology.

Keira plays the phonograph recording. At the same time, Keira overhears Stevie counting just like Ellie did. Keira snaps her son out of his trance.

The lights go out again. Keira feels a presence in the darkness with her when she becomes temporarily trapped in the cellar. After Brian gets her out, Keira tells him she dropped her phone and it disappeared. She also tells Brian how her research revealed John Fetherston’s family disappeared in the house, and she believes something strange is going on. Brian dismisses Keira as delusional.

Keira meets with gifted genius Dr. Remy Fournet at the college of mathematics where Fetherston worked. Remy reveals Fetherston was a colleague of Erwin Schrodinger. Keira shows Remy the equation from the cellar floor. Remy identifies the equation as a representation for a dimension, but requests additional time to study it further.

Remy calls Keira later on her new phone. Remy tells Keira he called her old phone several times and heard someone counting on the other end. Remy goes on to say that a colleague believes the equation comes from 12th century alchemy and can be likened to an unfinished incantation. Remy’s colleague saw the same equation in another case where a Belgian family disappeared.

Keira shows Brian how the Hebrew letters spell Leviathan, the serpent of the abyss. Keira also explains how Fetherston named the house after the Greek word for chaos, or the void before time. Brian contends Keira is drawing unrealistic conclusions.

Keira shows Brian the ten numbered cellar steps and tells him about the equation that relates to another dimension. In frustration, Brian takes a sledgehammer to the equation etched in the floor. An unusual echo reverberates, causing the phonograph recording to begin playing on its own. Steven sees a ghostly vision of Ellie upstairs. When the parents investigate, Brian finds their daughter’s phone.

Keira tracks down John Fetherston’s only surviving daughter, Rose. Rose reveals Leviathan is one of the seven princes of Hell, and her father summoned its ancient darkness when science was unable to save her ill brother Jack. Rose warns that the cellar is not the otherworldly portal, but rather, the entire house is.

Brian shows Keira that the triangles beneath the house’s Hebrew letters form the pentagram sigil of the demon Baphomet, indicating the whole house was designed around the demon. Keira concludes that reciting the equation opens the portal.

Keira plays the phonograph recording. Steven becomes entranced and disappears. When his parents finally recover him, they find Baphomet’s symbol on Steven’s chest. Steven chillingly claims he rode the beast with seven heads and ten horns.

Brian suddenly begins counting backwards. When Brian reaches zero, Baphomet emerges from the cellar. Keira flees from the creature, but ultimately runs into the cellar when all other exits are blocked off.

Keira enters a dark netherworld where hundreds of entranced people shuffle forward while counting. Keira finds Ellie, fights her way back past Baphomet, and returns upstairs with her daughter before locking the cellar door behind her.

Keira, Ellie, Brian, and Steven reunite. However, when they try to exit the house, Keira sees they are still at the bottom of a staircase in the netherworld. Becoming entranced again, Ellie, Brian, and Steven begin counting and walk away. Keira begins counting too.

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Review:

For someone who will always remember her best as Jack Bauer’s daughter on “24,” it’s odd, or merely a sign of how long it’s really been, to see Elisha Cuthbert playing the mother to a moody teenage daughter of her own. Yet here she is in “The Cellar,” moving into a macabre old manor with her husband and children, some of whom exhibit an indeterminate speaking style that’s either the actors failing to mask their Irish accents, or not leaning into the brogue deeply enough.

Keira and Brian Woods acquired their new home the way all families do in 90-minute haunted house chillers: they purchased it sight unseen at an auction, fully furnished, and without doing a single second of research on the previous owners or their property’s horrible history.

Had they done the due diligence any normal homebuyer would do in a pricey real estate deal, they would have discovered that “The Xaos House,” as its original architect ominously called it (How’s that for a red flag?), was built by eccentric academic John Fetherston. Obsessed with opening a doorway to another dimension, Fetherston combined 12th-century alchemy with mathematics to create an equation capable of achieving his otherworldly goal. It’s possible he succeeded too, because soon after, most of Fetherston’s family mysteriously disappeared.

There’s a little more to the mythology than that, of course. Also of course, Keira has to wait for mid-movie info dumps to find out the rest. I’ll give you three guesses as to how Keira gets that information. Unless you’re seeing a straightforward slow-burn suspense flick for the very first time, then you already know that the three best guesses for delivering deus exposition machina are:

1. Online research montage.
2. Old lady/man, often catatonic or committed to an asylum.
3. A similarly serendipitous smart guy who conveniently possesses the knowledge capable of propelling the plot forward again (usually in a sequence where acquiring this intel results in the hero having to race to another location before it’s too late).

No matter which option you picked, you’re right. “The Cellar” employs all three as part of its go-for-broke strategy to stuff the film full of as many tropes as possible, in every facet imaginable.

We’re getting ahead of ourselves. First, Keira’s daughter Ellie inexplicably vanishes. The only development done to her character involves angst and ennui. Her little brother annoys her. Mom and dad don’t understand her. She hates having to move into a new home. So when Ellie descends into the dark cellar and never returns, you have to wonder why anyone in her family, and certainly in the audience, would even want her to come back and continue complaining about everything.

Keira eventually connects Ellie’s disappearance to John Fetherston’s mystical mumbo jumbo, which initially involves summoning the massive sea serpent Leviathan, then morphs into some satanic hullaballoo about Baphomet, presumably because that’s an easier demon to put onscreen. Matching their daughter’s stereotyping, Keira’s husband Brian disbelieves everything Keira has to say about this supernatural strangeness as “delusional,” adding another time-killing impediment in her arc to have the full truth revealed. Once I linked Brian’s attractive blonde coworker to the movie excusing his ongoing absences as “working late,” I could practically hear a timebomb ticking on an extramarital affair’s exposure. To “The Cellar’s” credit, that’s one trope it doesn’t include, although maybe the script took a detour to streamline its standardized spookshow.

I wanted to preface everything above by saying, “I’m not entirely sure what to do with movies like ‘The Cellar’ anymore.” Then I heard the cynic in my head sarcastically cutting off that query with, “Easy. Pay them no mind and move right along.”

I realize how flippant the tone of this review has been. Believe it or not, I didn’t set out for it to sound this way. Constructed with competent craftsmanship from scenery to staging, there’s nothing “wrong” with anything “The Cellar” does. It’s a matter of literally all of it having been done before, and done to death at that. My exhaustion over mothers protecting children from evil entities and dusty houses hiding dark secrets simply can’t help but color my criticism with a distinct lack of enthusiasm.

The cliché train starts chugging with a rumbling “waaaaahhhhh” underneath opening credits that continues its warbling drone even after credits cut to, and stay on, a black screen. Attempts at atmosphere immersion continue with a camera prone to dollying slowly toward conspicuous objects like a curious portrait. Doors creak. Lights flicker. An echoing voice crackles over a vintage phonograph. People tiptoe around by candlelight and viewers cover their yawns with their hands.

When the screen isn’t so dark that you can actually make out what’s happening, you’ll see spine-tingling scares such as abacus counters moving without anyone touching them (ooh!), a ball bouncing down a staircase in a scene ripped right out of “The Changeling” (ah!), or a shadow suddenly passing in front of the lens. Like mustard on a ballpark hot dog, naturally that last one wouldn’t be complete without a loud audio sting on top.

An ending inspired by Lucio Fulci’s “The Beyond” features some nightmarish imagery and implications. As a whole though, “The Cellar” can only be considered unsettling if you find it frightening when entranced people repeatedly count to ten. The story’s stakes are low since we don’t really know what there is to worry about. Sure, the daughter disappeared, yet we have no idea what fate befell her. Bodies aren’t dropping. No one encounters threats of pain. The only risk is that someone else in the family might vanish too. But by waiting until the last act to put a possibility in play of being eaten by a monster, transformed into a monster, or possessed by a monster, there just isn’t any visceral fear to put a viewer’s anxiety on edge.

In this day and age of disposable DTV options coming out faster than they can be forgotten, is it enough for a film to be serviceable? For those who say yes, “The Cellar” may seem fine. There appears to be infinite space available on streaming services anxious for exclusive content whose thrills are in the room temp to lukewarm range. Yet while those companies’ insatiable appetite for midlevel movies continues growing, there’s less and less of a place for mediocre horror like “The Cellar” in our memory banks.

Review Score: 50

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