The Cellar, 2022.
Written and directed by Brendan Muldowney.
Starring Elisha Cuthbert, Eoin Macken, Abby Fitz, Dylan Fitzmaurice-Brady, Aaron Monaghan, Tara Lee, and Andrew Bennett.
SYNOPSIS:
Keira Woods’ daughter mysteriously vanishes in the cellar of their new house. She soon discovers there is an ancient and powerful entity controlling their home that she will have to face or risk losing her family’s souls forever.
The latest feature from Brendan Muldowney (Love Eternal, Pilgrimage) boasts admirable tonal restraint and aesthetic self-assurance, but neither that nor Elisha Cuthbert’s compelling lead performance can quite overpower The Cellar’s exhausting, po-faced avalanche of genre cliches.
As stories go, it’s pretty typical stuff; the Woods family – consisting of mother Keira (Cuthbert), father Brian (Eoin Macken), son Steven (Dylan Fitzmaurice Brady), and daughter Ellie (Abby Fitz) – move into their new home, a remote fixer-upper they snagged for a bargain at auction.
However, one evening shortly after moving in, Ellie disappears during a power cut, and when Keira discovers strange markings engraved on the walls among other seemingly paranormal phenomena, she comes to believe that the house somehow “took” her daughter.
The Cellar is at its core a fairly listless grab-bag of haunted house tropes, from the chintzy setup of the Woods family acquiring the house, to the authorities of course refusing to believe Keira, an array of metronomic jump scares, trawls through social media, a creepy son, a meeting with a supposed paranormal expert, and most of all, a lot of Google searches.
Muldowney rips through these over-familiar genre touchstones as though ticking off a to-do list, leading the end product to nary register much of a pulse. Though it gets mild credit for doing something vaguely inventive with the archetypal creepy basement, the moments of inspiration are fitful in a film that too often defers to the well-trod.
Without getting into too much detail, the otherworldly machinations are surprisingly hinged around mathematic equations of all things, which while less-conventional for this sort of movie don’t really end up any more interesting. The excess exposition is snoozy enough to transform the mythological musings into tiresome guff, while certain later-film revelations rouse unintentional laughs.
Even the suspense set-pieces are extremely low-stamina until the final 10-or-so minutes, and though Muldowney’s restrained, oft-static filmmaking is laudable to a point, it eventually becomes too inert for its own good.
The staging throughout is pretty stock, and the full-tilt funhouse stuff arrives too late to make much of an impact. The brief flashes of creature FX are effective enough, but neither they nor the solid final scene can save it. Despite a mere 94-minute runtime, this is a sluggish picture bloated out with subplots.
The cast should sleep soundly as they’ve done about as much as can be with the material, though, especially lead Cuthbert, who anchors the drama well as a frustrated mother desperate to rescue her daughter in the face of an increasingly bleak situation.
Cliches can absolutely be used as tools when a filmmaker wields them with sufficient aplomb, but there’s a highly programmatic feel to how Brendan Muldowney rattles through them in his new feature. Sadly Elisha Cuthbert’s firmly committed performance can’t prevent this dusty, aggressively generic haunted house horror from descending into tedium.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Shaun Munro – Follow me on Twitter for more film rambling.
