The Cellar: Review

17th April 2022

Keira Woods (Elisha Cuthbert) and her family have moved to a new place after she has secured a lucrative job in social media management. Her children react to things very different with her son, Steven (Dylan Fitzmaurice Brady) just going along with it, but her daughter, Ellie (Abby Fitz) is a typical teenager and seems to disagree with anything her mother says.

Then one night Ellie is alone in the house and has to go down to the cellar, but she’s scared and calls her mum who talks her through it, assuring her that everything is going to be alright. However, soon Keira realises that her daughter is going down further into the house than she thought was possible and when she gets home, Ellie has completely disappeared.

The Cellar is a supernatural horror exclusive to Shudder, written and directed by Brendan Muldowney. A horror movie with a familiar premise that audiences may recognise from some other supernatural family franchise, it seems that despite its escalating events of the last half hour, it really isn’t all that original.

It also doesn’t help that the first hour moves along at a glacial speed, making it feel like Ellie’s disappearance and the investigation doesn’t really matter. It seems that despite Keira’s half-hearted investigation doesn’t even affect the rest of the family in any tangible way, so it may be hard for the audience to care.

It also doesn’t help with the characterisation that the scenes at Keira’s workplace also feel rather uninspired. With little research into what Keira’s job may actually entail, there are holes that can be easily picked into what she does by the casual social media user.

Then when the solution to Ellie’s disappearance is solved, it changes the movie entirely. Although this doesn’t necessarily mean that the elevated horror is all that better as the conclusion becomes so over the top that it makes the events leading up to it feel completely unearned.

It could be said that the end of The Cellar doesn’t resemble the beginning of the movie in the slightest and normally that may have been a good thing. However, it just seems that Muldowney ran out of story and started to throw as many cliches at the screen as he could.

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