"The Cellar" too silly to earn shivers and too familiar to satisfy

The Cellar (2022)

“The Cellar” has one of those tired horror-movie setups that must exist in order for there to even be a movie. A family moves into an old house without doing their due diligence, only to discover that their home has a terrible past and deadly plans for them. Never mind that the parents purchased the property sight unseen to not notice the house is a portal to Hell, but there’s plenty of house research to do after something bad happens. Irish writer-director Brendan Muldowney (2017's "Pilgrimage") does dare to expand the mythology behind the mystery from his creepy 2004 short film “The Ten Steps,” but even as a feature-length expansion, this is a dull and rudimentary haunted-house chiller before drowning in its own absurd gobbledygook.

When their marketing job calls for them to move, Keira (Elisha Cuthbert) and Brian Woods (Eoin Macken) purchase a deceased academic’s old home outside Dublin at auction. Their teenage daughter Ellie (Abby Fitz) is especially surly about the move twenty minutes away from her friends, but even more so when she gets stuck watching her younger brother Steven (Dylan Fitzmaurice Brady) the first night in their new home. While Keira and Brian are at the office to pitch their vlog campaign, the power goes out at the house, where Ellie—yes, Ellie Woods, like Elle Woods from “Legally Blonde”—ends up going down to the cellar to check the circuit breaker and vanishing without a trace. It’s already too late, but Keira discovers inscrutable Hebrew symbols above each door architrave and even a mathematical equation that might have something to do with Ellie’s disappearance — and the owners before them. It has to be “an ancient evil.”

Eschewing gore and violence for portentous atmosphere, “The Cellar” still doesn’t deliver as “‘Poltergeist’ in a basement” to get a pass as gateway horror for families. Director Muldowney does eke out a few eerie moments early on, including the last phone conversation Keira has with her daughter counting the ten (but actually endless) cellar steps down into pitch-black nothingness, as well as when Keira herself gets locked in the cellar as something off-screen drifts up the stairs. Without loading up on shrieking jump scares, the film initially holds our interest with the use of suggestion and creeping dread. Then again, it’s not long before so many trips down to the cellar and Keira’s own Mythology Investigation through search engines and even to The National College of Mathematics (yes, seriously) become repetitive and increasingly silly. Things do perk up when Keira gets help from an offbeat physics professor (Aaron Monaghan), who (as a quirky throwaway detail) suddenly became a math genius after a car accident, but this lasts only a couple minutes. 

Elisha Cuthbert makes her comeback to the horror genre long after the pretty great “House of Wax” and the not-so-great “Captivity.” While it’s nice to see Cuthbert headlining a movie again, the usually vivacious actress mainly has to keep a straight face with so much clunky, expository material, and it's not always convincing. Cuthbert does make the aloof Keira proactive otherwise, considering she feels a lot of guilt and will go to the ends of the earth to find her daughter. It just doesn’t help that there’s so little foundation set to get a feel for the Woods family dynamic, rending the mother-daughter conflict too flimsy and flat to truly care about. 

With a haunted phonograph, alternate dimensions, leviathans, and 12th-century alchemy incantations, “The Cellar” is too hokey to be taken seriously and, with a self-locking cellar door and a disbelieving husband, it’s too achingly familiar to not recall better movies. Once the pieces of this mumbo jumbo mostly come together, the big climax gets a bit more lively, but it also shows the film’s budgetary restraints. Even the downbeat “Twilight Zone”-y resolution, which should be a gut punch, just paints itself into a corner and ends up being rather unsatisfying. Competently made but lacking any vision to distinguish itself, “The Cellar” feels like the kind of quaint horror movie that was shot long ago and is now ready to meet an already-advanced world. That’s not even the case, being shot during 2020, making it even more of a frustrating loss. Unfortunately, cellars will not become the fear equivalent of taking a shower (“Psycho”) or stepping foot into the ocean (“Jaws”) because of "The Cellar."

Grade: C -

Shudder and RLJE Films are releasing “The Cellar” (94 min.) in select theaters and on Shudder on April 15, 2022.