Many horror fans have lived in a house with a creepy basement – one where you flick the lights off and charge upstairs to escape whatever lurks in the dark. Maybe you even watch horror movies in such a basement.
Buyer beware
“The Cellar” (Shudder) makes a whole movie out of the concept, and after a slow start it turns into a good one. The setup is standard enough that I could copy and paste from my description of other films, such as “Brahms: The Boy 2.”
A blended Irish and American family moves into a mansion in Ireland (where the film is shot). The Woods family got it in a steal at an auction and didn’t bother to research its history. We mull that age-old horror-film conundrum: Would you jump at a great real-estate deal if the only catch is that the place is haunted?
“The Cellar” (2022)
Director: Brendan Muldowney
Writer: Brendan Muldowney
Stars: Elisha Cuthbert, Eoin Macken, Abby Fitz
I’d ask “How haunted?” Initially for the Woodses (Elisha Cuthbert’s Keira, Eoin Macken’s Brian, Abby Fitz’s teenage Ellie and Dylan Fitzmaurice Brady’s young Steven), it’s merely a tad creepy.
Perhaps they’d have been perfectly safe without a particularly bad piece of parenting. With the folks away at the office (they pitch advertising campaigns), the mansion’s power goes out. Ellie is literally crying, she’s so scared of checking the circuit box. But Keira talks her through the staircase’s 10 steps on the phone. After the 10th step, Ellie keeps counting – and disappears.
Into the Woodses
Writer-director Brendan Muldowney, expanding his own 10-minute short “The Ten Steps” (2004), stumbles over “The Cellar’s” middle portion. Multiple times, a family member gets locked behind the cellar door. In one case, Dylan can’t reach the key, so he has to get a chair. Then he can’t work the lock, but Brian comes along to free the scared Keira. I mean, the place is huge, so I suppose it’s possible he didn’t hear the commotion right away.
This stuff feels like narrative padding for the 94-minute film, although some sort of family dynamic does develop, if only because we see them together. Brian is hilariously in Scully mode as Keira pursues supernatural theories about their daughter’s disappearance; it’s to the point that I wondered if Brian was in on it.
Brady contributes that horror-kid vibe wherein Steven is scared, but he’s also scary to the viewer when he’s mesmerized by whatever haunts the house.
Cuthbert doesn’t get to show much range, but there’s enough audience goodwill that viewers will follow Keira’s journey. Folks hated Kim Bauer on “24,” but Cuthbert bounced back with “Happy Endings” and “The Ranch.” And even if Keira is a bad mother, she means well.
Math can be fun … and scary
Around the third act, “The Cellar” gets good. Setting it apart in the creepy-basement subgenre is some creepy math. The previous owner had peppered symbols and an equation throughout the house. Keira visits the requisite math geek at the local college and learns that the equation represents another dimension. I like the math prof’s allusion to Schrodinger’s Cat: Ellie is neither alive nor dead until they find her.
“The Cellar” isn’t the first story to blend mathematical dimensions with gateways to hell; I recall the “Angel” episode “Supersymmetry,” for example. But it does so in nicely spooky fashion. Possessed people chant the numbers, calling to mind victims in the “Blair Witch” films dutifully standing in basement corners, obeying an unseen witch.
Helped by a fine score by Stephen McKeon, Muldowney masters the “It’s what you don’t see that’s scary” brand of horror for a while. And the “what you sort of see” brand. In an outstanding shot, Steven stands at the bottom of the cellar stairs and we see what appears to be the outline of a demon in the background. It slowly comes into focus, and Steven gradually spots it out of the corner of his eye.
Muldowney proves a spooky basement can be more than a 10-minute concept, first with the mysterious mathematics and then with a very good finale that absorbs most of the CGI effects budget – to fine effect.
Similar to the slow build of Muldowney’s career (an 18-year wait from short to full-length film), “The Cellar” takes a long time go somewhere. But once it does, it’s worth the journey, and I suspect we’ll see more strong work from Muldowney.