CELLAR DOOR (2024)

Studio:   Lionsgate
Director: Vaughn Stein
Writer:   Sam Scott, Lori Evans Taylor
Producer: John Papsidera, Tom Butterfield, Craig Perry, Sheila Hanahan Taylor
Stars:    Jordana Brewster, Scott Speedman, Addison Timlin, Chris Conner, Laurence Fishburne, Katie O'Grady, Randy Sean Schulman

Review Score:

---

Summary:

Hoping for a fresh start, a grieving couple moves into a dream home that comes with a peculiar condition that they must never open its cellar door.

---

Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Devastated by a miscarriage, mathematician Sera Winter and her architect husband John decide to move out of the city to the outskirts of Portland, Oregon, for a fresh start. Unable to find anything ideal after a month of looking, their realtor Jeannie refers Sera and John to Emmett Claymore.

Emmett invites the couple to his lavish, remote home where he gets to know them over dinner and learns of their intention to start a family. Sera and John spend the night. When they wake the next morning, they find Emmett left a letter inviting them to take full ownership of the house on the sole condition that they never open its cellar door. Despite the oddness of that arrangement, Sera and John sign the paperwork and move in.

John is stunned when his coworker Alyssa Hayes, with whom he recently broke off an ongoing affair, shows up at a housewarming party. In a private conversation, Alyssa insists she still wants a relationship with John even though he refuses.

Partygoers are unsettled when a man later revealed to be previous homeowner Paul MacManus shows up outside holding a gas canister. Prior to leaving, Paul cryptically warns John to burn down the house before it destroys him.

John goes to work to discover he has been temporarily suspended because Alyssa reported him to HR for sexual harassment. Afraid to admit his affair, John hides his suspension from Sera.

Curious about the cellar door, John obtains the house's blueprints from a city records office where an administrative clerk identifies the home's previous owner as Paul MacManus. When John asks about Emmett, the clerk mentions Emmett's wife and daughter mysteriously disappeared 25 years ago.

From the blueprints, John locates a secret space under a staircase that connects to the cellar. However, John is unable to fully investigate the space before Sera returns home.

John arranges a clandestine meeting to confront Alyssa over her allegations. Feeling scorned, Alyssa reminds John he previously promised to leave his wife for her. John reiterates that he has no desire to ruin his marriage, and he threatens to kill Alyssa when she vows to reveal their relationship to Sera.

Alyssa comes to the house while Sera is home alone. Alyssa becomes distressed when she finds a positive test revealing Sera is pregnant. When he sees Alyssa's car driving away shortly thereafter, John follows the vehicle, although he eventually loses sight of it on a winding road.

John returns home to the welcome news that Sera is pregnant again. Having found the blueprints and investigated for herself, Sera confronts John about trying to see into the cellar from the secret passage. To honor the agreement they both made, John boards up the disguised doorway in the staircase.

John finally returns to work after HR clears him in the sexual harassment investigation. However, John learns Alyssa has not been seen in a week, and her car is later found abandoned.

While renovating a room to turn it into a nursery, John discovers a bullet lodged in a wall. Even though John worries it could be evidence that Emmett murdered his missing wife and daughter, Sera reasons the police would have already investigated, which persuades John to not report it.

Over drinks at a bar, Sera learns from neighbor Kathryn Conrad that other families abruptly vanished from the house. On a nearby TV, Sera sees a news report identifying Alyssa as a missing person. Sera later goes through John's computer and phone to confirm he and Alyssa were having an affair, and HR had been investigating Alyssa's complaint against him.

Detectives Stark and Weiland come to the house to question John about Alyssa's disappearance. When the detectives press John as a possible suspect, Sera suddenly steps in to invent an alibi. After the detectives leave, Sera angrily confronts John about his affair, but she refuses to ask him about Alyssa vanishing.

John tracks down Paul MacManus. Outing himself as an alcoholic who ruined his marriage, Paul claims it isn't the house, but rather the secrets kept from spouses that corrupt its occupants. Paul advises that seeing the truth inside yourself is the only true way to escape, as he himself never opened the cellar door.

John returns home to Sera. Apologizing for everything he's done, John contends they cannot live in that house anymore. Sera counters that she is trying to protect the life they deserve. Insisting they have to get out of there, John attempts to force open the cellar door. Sera knocks John unconscious.

When John recovers, Sera reveals she already knew about John's longtime affair. Perceiving her as a threat to their dream life, Sera shot and strangled Alyssa when she came to the house. John thought he was following Alyssa that day, but it was actually Sera driving the car to be disposed of. Sera thought she had covered her tracks until John discovered the bullet in the wall. Sera also reveals John unknowingly sealed Alyssa's body inside the staircase when he nailed the secret door shut.

Holding him at gunpoint, Sera threatens to frame John for Alyssa's murder if he turns her in to the police. John ultimately chooses to remain with Sera and willingly play the part of a dutiful husband in her idealized marriage.

During a baby shower months later, Sera and John receive another letter from Emmett, who thanks them for finally turning the house into a family home. Accompanied by a key to the cellar door, Emmett also presents them with an option to open it, although he says he believes they already know what's inside.

---

Review:

In a press release identifying the movie's genre as "Horror/Thriller," which turns out to be debatable, the studio's synopsis of "Cellar Door" said, "Looking for a fresh start after a miscarriage, a couple (Brewster and Speedman) find themselves being gifted the house of their dreams from a wealthy homeowner (Laurence Fishburne) with one caveat - they can never open the cellar door. Whether they can live without knowing triggers shocking consequences."

I figured it was likely a longshot, but based on that summary, my horror-minded imagination immediately conjured images of a hideous monster, something like The Simpsons' secret son Hugo eating buckets of fish heads, yet more grotesque than that. Or maybe a secret passageway to a Satanic church, an otherworldly portal to Hell, or a serial killer's hidden dungeon for dicing up victims. To anyone curious, I'm sorry to say what's actually on the other side of the cellar door is far more disappointing than anyone can imagine, and so is the bland movie bearing its name.

Hopes of "Cellar Door" having anything close to the horrors offered above are quickly dashed in the film's first few mundane minutes. That's when we meet ordinary couple John and Sera as they pick out paint for their unborn baby's nursery with "It Was Love at First Sight" peppily pumping out of the soundtrack. After brushing their teeth together, the couple whispers loving endearments while Sera still wears full makeup in bed. Next up on the itinerary of absentee thrills, we see Sera teaching a college course on "Logic and The Science of Statistical Reasoning," probably for the same reason the score loads up on piano and violin music: to confirm this is supposed to be a strictly serious film, not a B-grade monster movie.

More accurately, "Cellar Door" carries big made-for-cable energy as a Lifetime-level MOW about secrets kept from spouses. Soon after accepting the unusual offer of a lavish home for the low cost of not looking in its basement, everyone almost forgets all about the cellar's mystery as the movie makes way for a love triangle tale involving John's scorned mistress, and the lies he has to live to keep Sera from finding out about his affair.

It'll never cease to amaze me how it apparently takes two credited writers to come up with a script as dull and as dry as "Cellar Door." With straightforward last names like Winter, Hayes, and Stark, characters are so generic, even end credits confuse one of them as Peter even though his name is Paul. Meanwhile, dialogue consists of lines like, "It's been one month," "It's been two weeks," "You haven't been in the office in five weeks," and "You had a hell of a year" because no one can speak without adding exposition denoting a specific passage of time.

It's a bit rich that the tagline "Discover what lies behind the..." sits above the title on the poster because the movie doesn't definitively reveal what's behind the door, much less why it must stay locked, or what would happen if it were opened. Instead, the implication is that the door is an intangible symbol of the movie's theme regarding how far people are willing to go to protect a romanticized ideal. That would be all well and good if "Cellar Door" didn't misrepresent its story with a gross misunderstanding of how to properly use a MacGuffin.

Rather than being an interchangeable prop to propel the plot, which is what a MacGuffin is meant to do, imagine if "Pulp Fiction" changed the role of the briefcase by making the central story about finding out what's inside. In that scenario, you'd be rightfully upset if the film didn't follow through with a satisfying reveal. In the movie Quentin Tarantino made, however, the briefcase's contents don't matter because they have no direct impact on anything.

"Cellar Door" doesn't want what's in the basement to materially matter either, except the story anchors its main reason for existing on the door. To tell an audience not to project literal importance on the key object that's the title of the movie is laughable at best and insulting at worst.

Ironically, "Cellar Door" does understand one of Alfred Hitchcock's other cornerstone conceits: "refrigerator logic," his term relating to silly or serendipitous events that fail to make sense when examined in hindsight. Sera's actions in particular are especially reliant on convenient timing, almost as much as the editing cheats that cut out chronological content so supposed "twists" seem like surprises later. Limping on one leg loaded with these contrivances and another leg built by boring storytelling, "Cellar Door's" nearly nonexistent mystery ends up being a whole lot of rigamarole for basic drama involving a man who cheated on his wife, and nothing else worth any notable intrigue.

Review Score: 35

---