Like a math equation that Keira finds on a cornerstone, whose Hebrew characters can be read as “ Leviathan” if you treat the equation like a word scramble. To be fair, Keira’s just moved into her expansive new country home-filmed in Roscommon, Ireland!-and her skeptical husband Brian ( Eoin Macken) doesn’t seem as concerned about the weird “glyphs” that she finds all over the house. We follow concerned and increasingly obsessed parent Keira Woods ( Elisha Cuthbert) as she tries to figure out how exactly her reluctant teenage daughter Ellen ( Abby Fitz) disappeared into their new house’s basement. Problems with “The Cellar” start immediately and continue throughout. something!-to make it compelling enough to withstand comparisons to its many generic precedents. All it needs to be is a little more of something-energetic, gross, thoughtful. “The Cellar” doesn't even need to be a smarter or even more faithful homage. It's a nifty opening, nasty in its vagueness, that may have made for a better short film or story.Too bad, because “The Cellar” doesn’t have the manic energy that could have compensated for its lack of creepy and/or memorable Lovecraftian horrors. but then never stops counting steps as her voice becomes more trance-like. The film never gets much better than the set up, which involves Keria on the phone with her daughter while the poor girl heads down into their basement during a blackout, counting the steps as she goes. Evil dimensions, forbidden gateways, and mythological demons flood the finish, flattening the initial eeriness. Without spoiling things, ancient alchemist math is involved. The strongest parts are the mystery, and sadly the film doesn't produce a satisfying ending.
No one's bad, but the characters are just kind of dead on arrival.Īt its best, The Cellar evokes creepy elements from The Blair Witch Project and the novel House of Leaves, but once the answers start coming in, the story loses steam. Keira's husband, Brian (Eoin Macken), is kind of a blank slate, coming off as almost cold and uncaring about his daughter's vanishing while young Dylan Fitzmaurice Brady plays their son, who sometimes gets controlled by the house so he can be the creepy dead-stare horror kid. The film gets a little too dramatic too soon with its musical cues, giving haunting clichés and fake outs too much early weight while the rest of the story plays out in a by-the-numbers fashion.Ĭuthbert's Keira, the American in the family, does her internet research on the markings, consults with an expert, and tracks down a past resident, collecting the clues until the specific demonic culprit is revealed in a rather ho-hum non-twist. Irish writer/director Brendan Muldowney sets this tale in his home country, adding to the mysticism and chilliness, as Cuthbert's clan moves into an old house filled with foreboding symbols, paintings, and objects. The Cellar has some nice moments of tense terror here and there but ultimately it plays out very conventionally, and the third act underwhelms with a hodgepodge of the usual supernatural suspects.Ĭuthbert is in good form here playing the horror mom, the only one in her family who believes that her rebellious daughter, Ellie (Abby Fitz), was somehow crazily consumed by dark forces and didn't just run away from home because she was miserable. Elisha Cuthbert returns to her aughts-era horror past ( House of Wax, Captivity) with The Cellar, the story of a mother desperately trying to locate her daughter in the great beyond after the poor teen seemingly gets swallowed up by their old musty house's basement.
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