There is so much to be said about Cellar Door, in the same time there is much that cannot be said. The director, Vaughn Stein (Terminal) of this picture, has also gone extreme, many of the twists and the turns as the movie unfolds are deep and cut to the bone, however, it does fall short of the brilliance and flair associated with other like-minded films, Cuckoo, Longlegs and Blink Twice. The movie starts slow but the intensity increases towards the end when the cell door is finally opened after much anticipation, and the audience starts reeling and trying to fit all the loose ends as they unfold in the best manner. The film manages to create a strong bhav that allows the audience to remain focused on the climax and see how everything plays out, and we must say its quite engaging.
The story of the film which is penned down by Sam Scott and Lori Evans Taylor (Bed Rest, Final Destination: Bloodlines), centers around Sera and John (Jordana Brewster and Scott Speedman), a couple in the city who decide to move to the suburbs of Portland. Another man’s name is Emmett (Laurence Fishburne) who has an eye for people and properties and in no time decides to make the couple their perfect home.
The only problem is this: the cellar door is never to be opened. But, as a rule, doors are an artificially constructed target that usually proves too much of a temptation. The film builds tension on a ‘will they/won’t they’ scenario that rumbles along through the movie and is resolved in an exhilarating twist in the film’s climax. With Brewster and Speedman acting in the lead roles, you are in for a psychological slant in this more than supernatural horror named as Cellar Door.
Cellar Door starts with Sera and John getting ready to welcome a new member to the family, and in this case, a baby, so they decide to set up a nursery. The couple seemed excited about the idea of having a baby and were ready to embrace the busy life. Then Sera loses her first baby, which always seems to change everything. What do people do? More often than not, they move to the burbs. That is where Sera and John seem to have headed and want to start afresh. A gentleman named Emmett is more than a little willing to help the couple. Lawrence Fishburne has performed literally hundreds of convincing roles in the least believable universes, from the Matrix films to John Wick, and this time is no different; he plays an overly concerned, overly soft man domineeringly well.
However, we understand from the start that Emmett appears much more to the narrative than is told about him and especially when he tells Sera and John not to open the cellar door, we think that there is more to the story. What it does, however, is create a compelling mystery that drives the film quite well from that point onward. Be patient. This film is what you would probably call a slow burn, but when the pay-off comes, which they do eventually, all of them come together to form not only a different kind of haunting but one which the viewer may not have envisioned at all.
The ultimate reveal is that there are dark forces waiting behind the cellar doors in the back of the house which are usually featured quite a lot to build some pretty good tension. Cue: haunting music crescendos. Everything which is father of the cellar doors goes uncrossed for the period but the plots of our major characters… not so much. They come out gradually, building up to a few rather neat surprises, most of which center on John, who grows increasingly obsessed with the enigma concealed beneath the structure.
What Vaughn Stein does very well in relation to the material supplied by the screenwriters is to transform it into this Faustian bargain — Edgar Allan Poe style. Stealing ideas from such literary and movie gems as “The Tell-Tale Heart”, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca or Paul Feig’s A Simple Favor, the filmmaker posits the following in the form of a bold question: What would you be willing to offer to the “devil” to make your fantasies bear fruit?
Emmett serves as a reasonable substitute for Big D, although he is not that much of the evil sort. Pleasantly incendiary, rather, and still, some of his meandering speech is more appealing than it is not. Sooner or later, a number of the neighbors come in saying “that person who used to live in the house”. When John suddenly gets involved in some business skirmish, it spills over to his private affairs, further stoking his ambition to commit a breach of the couple’s arrangement with Emmett.
The writers are right in savoring John’s work angst for it is a good reason for them to pivot the trajectory of the film and provide a plethora of work colleagues, complex scenarios and events from John’s past in order to keep this thriller burning. To his credit, Scott Speedman is believable here, but the film only gives the character quite a limited range, much of which we have seen already in his previous characters, such as Nick Marsh from Grey’s Anatomy. Jordana Brewster fairs a bit better, and the writers have been able to do wonders while giving a stereotypical description as a math teacher. (Sera’s smarts come in handy later.) In this film, everything has a point, which is of course another fine element of Cellar Door. Nothing is unnecessary. It is simply that at times, it appears to be quite tedious.
That’s perfectly fine. So far throughout this year, for example, the likes of Joker: Folie à Deux, Borderlands, and AfrAId, we have several tales that simply failed, no matter how much sweat went into creating the anticipation. Not so in Cellar Door – the expectation pays off. Watch how insidiously the director shows a ray of hope to the couple and then plunges the creative knife deep enough to raise the doubt of even their marriage. Or, how nicely this huge structure, a colon of sorts, becomes a very large and menacing character in its own right. And what (brief) relief it is to see John giving up and trying to avoid the dreadful doors of the cellar in an attempt to look for an alternate entrance to the room underneath.
There’s even very good employment of some B deciders, whose presence in the story has some more importance than we expect, Chris Conner and Katie O’Grady, we see you. Cellar Door in the end makes us understand that every one of us possesses the horror that lies in the very bowels of the imagination; horrors that we are capable of burying deep in the vaults of our psyche, unearthing under emergencies alone. For all its flaws, this is one hell of a moral type of story.
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