Granted on one condition – never to enter the family’s restricted area – the Bluebird-like hook of extravagance raises expectations of a spooky, macabre good time. These expectations are almost entirely thwarted by “Cellar Door,” even to the point that we never glimpse behind the titular closed gate. Starring Jordana Brewster and Scott Speedman as a couple gifted with luxurious new digs with the aforementioned condition, Von Stein’s thriller is too simplistic and implausible to cause any chills. But despite some exciting final plot elements, it’s also too good of a TV movie mode to provide much frivolous fun. Lionsgate releases the feature in limited US theaters as well as on-demand platforms on November 1.
The Winters are an attractive, loyal pair of yuppies and offer little in the way of personality here through their performers or script. John (Speedman) is an important employee in an architecture firm; Sera (Brewster) is a mathematics professor and an accomplished pianist. They have been trying for their first child for some time. When success finally ends in a crushing miscarriage, the couple decides they need a fresh start, and leaves central Portland, Oregon for the suburbs.
They’re having no luck finding a home until they meet the mysterious Emmett Claiborne (Laurence Fishburne), an old-school gentleman who lives in a 1918 Jacobean Revival-style house on a gated estate. He claims to have a knack for matching the right people to the right place, and insists on staying for dinner, and then all night. In the morning, they found him gone, though he had left papers promising them that it was freely theirs. The only caveat is… well, you guessed it, never go beyond the locked basement door.
John is skeptical, finding it all too good to be true. But Sera is overjoyed, and decides that they have a “perfect life” and it would be foolish to refuse her. (While these characters are undoubtedly well paid, it would never occur to anyone that the real-life maintenance costs alone of this almost palace-like place and its grounds would be astronomical.) Of course, John’s doubts immediately began to be stoked. Obsessive curiosity about the forbidden vault, especially when we learn that Emmett’s family disappeared from the building long ago, and the other residents have since fled after curiously brief stays. When the Winters throw a party, it is crashed by a distraught former tenant (Chris Conner), who warns about the house: “You must burn it down before it’s too late… It will destroy you.”
But the supernatural threat hinted at was less urgent than the threats posed by John’s co-worker Alyssa (Addison Timlin), with whom he had an affair that preceded his marriage — but which also relapsed several times afterward. She’s the classic “scorned woman”, similar to “Fatal Attraction”, determined to destroy his life if he doesn’t spend it with her. She filed a false sexual harassment complaint, which led to his suspension. This becomes another thing he must hide from his pregnant wife again, mindful of Emmett’s candid statement, “Houses are like people, they all have their deep, dark secrets.” As Alyssa’s revenge grows more aggressive, the possibilities for violence and past sins hidden in the basement are naturally intertwined.
Briefly filmed with a step into dramatic terrain and suspense around the two-thirds point, “Cellar Door” is otherwise frustratingly mild — the kind of film whose damning words count afterwards as to why it gets an “R.” You wouldn’t feel the lack of exploitative elements if there were more subtle elements, like a sinister atmosphere or complex character psychology. But these factors are sorely absent. There’s none of the “old dark house” horror in the surroundings here, which have been decorated in faded good taste by production designer Angela J. It was named and lit as if it were a photo in a lifestyle magazine published by DP Michael Merriman. The tenor of the TV series is enhanced rather than disturbing by Marlon Espino’s original score.
Nor can the actors find a way to liven up roles that offer little more than visceral stabs in some of the clumsier passages in Sam Scott and Laurie Evans Taylor’s screenplay. For example, Serra’s undergraduate lectures inexplicably move from statistics to chaos theory and the “butterfly effect,” because clearly undergraduates need mathematics infused with the noble life wisdom derived from those concepts. Another character gets a more groaning monologue in which she explains that the house represents a “Faustian bargain…a perfect life for the low cost of your soul.” However, this mysterious edge has not yet been fully developed. Instead, there is an eventual buildup of scheming machinations that requires us to believe that a character painted throughout as uncomplicated was actually harboring the cunning of a criminal mastermind.
This much implausibility should be at least more entertaining than what Stine offers (“Inheritance,” “Every Breath You Take”). In press materials, the director cites inspiration from Edgar Allan Poe’s “Gone Girl,” “Rebecca” and “Rosemary’s Baby.” But while one problem is that these effects feel like Frankenstein thrown together inorganically in the script, the other problem is that their execution lacks the spirit needed to make the conflicting elements work in terms of suspense or sheer style. This is a generally competent treatment of material that needs some maddening conviction to get past its weaknesses on the page. You know something has gone wrong when your biggest takeaway from a semi-haunted house story is: “Yes, the central location would definitely be good for upscale weddings and receptions.”