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The Cellar was directed and written by Brendan Muldowney and stars Elisha Cuthbert, Eion Macken, Dylan Fitzmaurice Brady, Aaron Monaghan, and Abby Fitz. It’s about a married couple whose daughter disappears in the cellar of their new house, leaving them to face the entity responsible or lose her forever.

The Plot: Every now and again, there will be a movie with a few good ideas that bends itself backwards to appease a wide audience at the cost of those said ideas. The Cellar is one of those, offering a story more concerned with logic and consistency than its creativity.

Marketing specialists Keira (Cuthbert) and Brian (Macken) have just bought a house in the Irish countryside, impressing their son Steven (Brady), but not their daughter Ellie (Fitz). On their first night properly moved in, the parents are conveniently called to work, leaving the kids on their own for a few hours. Of course, this is a mistake, as they return to find Ellie has gone missing in the house’s cellar, despite its spatial limitations. Muldowney has a rather generic – albeit competent – setup that doesn’t invite investment. The cops can do nothing and Keira begins her own search.

Formula continues to be adhered to, as cryptic Latin wording and Hebrew characters within the house inform the mother’s investigation, but The Cellar uses these would-be cliches to point towards a process happening in the background. Again though, Muldowney struggles with the journey, as Dr. Fournet (Monaghan) enters the picture while adding little that couldn’t be accomplished by Keira and Brian to it. Regardless, the movie points towards an alchemical equation of dimensions with demonic connotations that must be solved to find Ellie. It’s a rarity that a horror movie would make a plot point out of a math equation, and even rarer still that it actually makes sense.

All that being said, The Cellar adds up to a familiar sum, even with its bold ending; it’s above average, but too constricted by the use of tropes to be memorable.

The Characters: With emphasis instead on the plot and scares, Muldowney fails to do anything interesting with his cast. Content with less than the bare minimum of personality and conflict, this fractured family is underwritten and interchangeable.

Keira has a touch of detachment from her kids, which ties into her and Brian’s profession of marketing to target audiences through deceptive means, creating conflict between adolescents in order to drive sales (what she’s marketing is never mentioned). However, The Cellar fails to make anything of that angle, and instead drops it as soon as Ellie goes missing in favor of watching the mother discover her daughter’s secrets. Her arc is supposed to be one of understanding within a mystery, but Keira’s bond is never clarified, leaving it moot.

Both of the males in the family do next to nothing. Brian seems remarkably unconcerned with Ellie’s disappearance and overly dismissive of Keira’s evidence of a demonic presence. Since he works alongside his wife, this could be tied to his detachment from the lives of youth, but as mentioned before, the movie doesn’t take the opportunity to tie the points together. Steven does even less. Left to explore the house and play video games, he does that, and nothing else.

Ellie is another cardboard character made of rote traits. She’s a rebellious teen, hating everyone and everything aside from her boyfriend (who gets zero screen time) and immersing herself in anarcho-communist ideation and edgy atheism. Because she’s present for so little of The Cellar, her reasons for conflict are unknown (bullying is briefly mentioned), making her outright unlikeable. At least her forgettable family is a neutral presence, I guess.

The Horror: Although the movie is eager to play to those expecting a haunted house feature, most of the setpieces contained therein are too familiar in their content to do much in the way of scaring.

Ellie’s disappearance is probably the movie’s best moment, making use of Keira’s tactic of counting to remove stress in a way that only causes more for her daughter. After Steven finds a phonograph and plays the record (containing a reading of the movie’s equation), the lights go out and Ellie has to turn the breaker back on, but the titular location is an uneasy place. To brave the dark, she counts the stairs as she descends, with the ten stairs soon turning into twenty, then thirty, with her voice trailing off until she vanishes. It’s a great moment, as Muldowney escalates a breeze that dims Ellie’s candle the further she goes into an impossible space, creating the mystery with ease.

Between that setpiece and Keira’s resolution to the mathematical mystery, The Cellar relies on old hat scares without the meticulous setup of the former. Screaming faces made with specialized paint, doors opening, closing, and locking themselves, and lights flickering and going out are results of characters interacting with the house’s bizarre decor. Because of the liberal placement of the phrases, clues, and quirks throughout the house, characters are always interacting or thinking about them, allowing Muldowney to overuse already tired horror tropes to the point of ineffectiveness. It’s a good thing the movie has an actual plot.

When the forces behind these occurrences are revealed, it gives the movie more leeway to create a frightening end. Because the script tied itself to the idea of another dimension being at the end of the math, it can use the stretching of reality to its benefit. Non-Euclidian spaces get some love, and the use of a Schrodinger’s Cat-like stasis create far more scary moments than the light gusts of wind do, but it’s a shame that the rest of the movie doesn’t maintain the dread of the beginning and end.

The Technics: Muldowney crafted a horror movie, and he wants audiences to know it. Most backend choices seem made to make sure the feature reaches its target audience, with the director reluctant to do or say anything different from the pack.

An on-location shoot at a beautiful house in Roscommon, Ireland and some good lighting give The Cellar some texture, which the film desperately needs, as just about all of its other construction elements hammer home the feeling that the movie has atmosphere. Glossy but forgettable cinematography from Tom Comerford, an intrusive score by Stephen McKeon, and a repetitive screenplay beat the audience over the head to tell them how to respond instead of letting them do it themselves.

It feels as though the movie was made with prerequisites in mind, as the tone is uniform throughout the runtime (the first ominous shot occurs literally as soon as the opening credits conclude) at a flat place. Not helping matters is the cast, who, aside from Cuthbert, give auto-pilot performances to a competent but monotone script filled with underdeveloped characters.

Some spooky highlights and an interesting plot keep The Cellar from being a complete blank of a movie, but it’s still inconsequential – especially when thinking about the potential for a better result with the same concept.

55/100