The Cellar (2022)

May 4, 2022 8:05 PM

Keira (Elisha Cuthbert) finds that her daughter has mysteriously vanished in the cellar of their new house. She soon discovers there is an ancient and powerful entity controlling their home that she will have to face or risk losing her family's souls forever.

Currently streaming in the US on Shudder.

posted by DirtyOldTown (7 comments total)

On the one hand, this is being pilloried as a 2/10 or 3/10 kinda thing when I think it's more like a 5/10 or 5.5/10 inessential but solid time waster. On the other hand, Elisha Cuthbert who entered my consciousness as a diffident teenager on 24 is now playing the mother of a diffident teenager and that is scarier than anything in this movie. Time comes for us all. Goddamn, goddamn.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 8:21 PM on May 4, 2022 [7 favorites]

The original ten minute short this is based on is so much better. The director/writer didn't need to pad it out to make a feature length film.
posted by Kitteh at 5:21 AM on May 5, 2022 [8 favorites]

I thought it was probably a good 5/10, watchable but not doing anything new or interesting. I had no idea it was based on a short, and it's funny: for me, the scariest/best part of the movie was the bit from the short. To be honest, I think it was even a little creepier in the film than the short, but yes the rest of the film did seem more like filler around that bit. Same thought about Elisha Cuthbert--too strange to see her as the mother of a teenager! Though she was pretty good. The husband in the film is so weirdly useless the whole time, like he's not even a person, just a vague plot point there to helm the "calm down, you're just a hysterical woman/mother" trope.
posted by kittensyay at 8:23 AM on May 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

Agree on 5/10, watchable but not essential, and my favorite part is also the part from the short (though the most terrifying part of the short is the parents' atrocious cell phone etiquette). And while I've seen Elisha Cuthbert in horror before, my main mental image of her is from Happy Endings in which she was hilarious, so it was less weird to see her grown up and more weird to see her so serious.

HOWEVER, another thing I enjoyed was the vision of Hell near the end with the lost souls endlessly shuffling across an infinite plain, mindlessly counting their steps. I love abstract and unusual visions of Hell. That ended things on a good note for me.
posted by ejs at 6:21 PM on May 5, 2022

Thanks for that link, kitten! That was worth seeing.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:52 PM on May 5, 2022

*kitteh. Damn you, autocorrect.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 11:18 AM on May 6, 2022

Yes, one huge advantage the short had over the feature film was getting to use the credits… loved the increasingly crunchy footsteps.
posted by ejs at 5:04 PM on May 6, 2022