Mark Reviews Movies: THE CELLAR (2022)

The Cellar, RLJE Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 14, 2022

The basic idea for writer/director Brendan Muldowney's The Cellar comes from a 2004 short he made. In all that time in between, the filmmaker could only come up with this meandering, delaying, and formulaic expansion to what's otherwise a mysteriously promising setup. Sometimes, it's better just to leave a mystery as a mystery.

Admittedly, the premise here is pretty routine from the start. A family of four moves into an old, creepy house in the middle of nowhere. Parents Keira (Elisha Cuthbert) and Brian (Eoin Macken) work for an advertising firm (There's a surprising amount of the two at their jobs, considering how little it figures into the story), and teenage daughter Ellie (Abby Fitz) is angry and going through an anarchist phase, while younger son Steven (Dylan Fitzmaurice-Brady) is a bit of a nuisance to his sister and likes video games.

That's all we get in terms of characterization, and for as much as Muldowney attempts to dive into the mythology behind what's happening inside the house, one supposes we should be grateful even for this little. The introductory scenes here spend about as much time offering a tour of the house and pointing out its soon-to-be important quirks as they do giving us an idea of these characters as individuals and a family.

Anyway, the parents have to go to work for an important meeting on the family's first night in the house (which feels like a stretch, especially given the purpose of the meeting). Steven finds a hidden closet behind a wall, containing a giveaway cloak and an even more obviously sinister animal skull. While Ellie sits alone watching television, a gust of wind emerges from beneath the cellar door, and one by one, the lights in the house start to flicker before going out entirely.

The girl calls her mother, who tells Ellie she needs to go into the cellar and check the fuse box. Ellie is scared to do so, but it's only ten steps ("You counted them?" the daughter asks, which is a much better question about when Keira would have time to and why she even would do so, except to set up this scene, than the movie acknowledges). She starts descending, counting the steps along the way, and Muldowney makes sure we know this ordinary activity is supposed to be frightening by having composer Stephen McKeon pummel our eardrums with percussion and dissonant strings.

Ellie reaches the tenth step, and Keira is relieved—until Ellie keeps counting stairs. When the parents return home, their daughter has disappeared.

It's a fine enough setup, even if Muldowney has to contrive his way to reaching it and establishing a puzzle for Keira to solve (Brian seems generally unconcerned that his daughter is missing without a trace). The pieces here include a bunch of symbols scattered throughout the house (A co-worker who does typography offers a quick and convenient answer to those symbols and what they mean when put together in the right order) and a gramophone with a recording of a man reciting math and counting.

Key to everything is a mathematical equation carved into the stone floor of the cellar at the base of the steps. To figure out that part, Keira contacts a university physics professor (played by Aaron Monaghan), who has an elaborate, ludicrous, and completely unnecessary back story that just raises a bunch of questions—mainly about why Muldowney would include the information. There is, at least, some amusement in the filmmaker's implied beliefs that math is a complex, inherently dark sort of magic and that the most soul-crushing vision of eternal torment he can imagine is counting (Less amusing, though, are the uneasy implications of putting all of this evil within the realm of Judaism and Jewish mythology).

Keira keeps finding and investigating clues, and then she waits around for the answers. Occasionally, she or Steven (Brian really, really doesn't care about any of this, apparently) will make their way toward or into the cellar, where there await odd noises, unnatural growling, or a figure in silhouette (Muldowney holds on one shot of that shadow in the background for so long that one wonders whether he overestimates his ability to be subtle or underestimates our perception). The big payoffs include a monster that appears in exactly one shot and a vision of damnation that would be eerie, if not for the bigger contrivances of and surrounding that scene. In fact, that second part could be aimed at every scene of The Cellar, as well as the whole of the movie.

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