CELLAR DOOR - Mark Reviews Movies

Cellar Door, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 31, 2024

It's what we don't know that haunts us, or that's the vague idea of the conceit of Cellar Door, a movie so stuck on its gimmick that it neglects everything else. There's a pretty simple mystery that eventually emerges here, but by the time that puzzle arrives, the screenplay by Sam Scott and Lori Evans Taylor treats it in an obligatory, perfunctory fashion.

The air of mystery is apparently more important to Vaughn Stein, and as tantalizing as the idea of what's behind a locked door could be, it's also a pretty thin concept upon which to latch so much significance and so much of the movie's purpose. At a certain point, there's little reason to care about what might be behind the door, let alone if the thing is meant to be taken literally or as a metaphor.

That's mostly because the characters and story surrounding that hollow gimmick are, well, pretty hollow themselves. It starts with some sincerity, at least, as we meet John (Scott Speedman) and Sera (Jordana Brewster), a married couple living in the city and expecting their first child. He works at some big real estate firm, and she teaches math, which lets the screenwriters introduce concepts like the butterfly effect and chaos theory to lend some import on the chain of events that will later—as in much later—lead to the story's last gasp of coming up with something concrete.

She has a miscarriage while he's at work, leading the two to decide to move to a small town. The problem is that no one's selling in this place, but their broker points them in the direction of Emmett (Laurence Fishburne), a man who has lived in a grand mansion on the outskirts of town for several decades. The three talk, hinting at and eventually divulging things about their lives, and hit it off well. Emmett asks the couple if having a house like his would make things better for them, but it turns out not to be a hypothetical question.

He doesn't want to live in this manor anymore, and when John and Sera wake up the next morning after spending the night in a guest room, they find a note from Emmett. He has left and gifted them the mansion but has only one stipulation: They cannot open the door to the cellar. It seems too good to be true, and while the movie wants us to believe the temptation of opening the door is the real rub of this scenario, just imagine the property taxes the couple will suddenly have to pay on this estate.

Anyway, the story kind of forgets about the cellar door for a bit, as John and Sera do go back to living a happy life together, return to working, and throw a big party for their friends and co-workers. At that party, a mysterious man (played by Chris Conner) shows up on the lawn with a gas canister. He wants to burn down the mansion, because he thinks it's evil or something like that, but after John talks to him for less than a minute, the guy apparently changes his mind entirely. The house can't be that bad, apparently.

That scene and its lack of follow-up—until much later, when we learn who the man and what his connection to the house are—get at the core of the problem here. This is a story built upon multiple implications—that there's something wrong with house, that Emmett might have a big secret (A bigger question is how the whole plot starts, once something about the man is revealed), that there is something important about the cellar door—and very little in terms of any explanation.

Soon enough, something of a plot emerges, as a co-worker (played by Addison Timlin) accuses John of sexual harassment, leaving him alone in the mansion all day to ponder about these questions. After he tries and fails to pry open the cellar door, he seems to think he has found a workaround to the contract by going through the floorboard to reach the cellar. It's an amusing case of following the letter of the law but ignoring the spirit of it.

None of this really matters, though, because the cellar door doesn't mean much, except as a metaphor about the dark secrets people keep, and the plot circles around John's connection to his co-worker, as well as what he might do to keep that a secret from Sera. That plot is made up of further implications here and, at least, an explanation of what has happened when the filmmakers deceptively edit around key acts. Cellar Door is so indirect about its plot, characters, and ideas that it feels as if the whole thing is one big cheat.

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