Film review: Horror flick The Cellar certainly can’t be faulted for its ambition
Elisha Cuthbert stars as Keira Woods in The Cellar
(15A) stars Elisha Cuthbert as Keira Woods, who moves her family — husband Brian (Eoin Macken), teenager Ellie (Abby Fitz) and young son Steven (Dylan Fitzmaurice Brady) — into a ramshackle country pile.
Busy meeting deadlines, Keira and Eoin rush back to the office on their very first night in the house, whereupon Ellie promptly goes missing whilst exploring the cellar, leaving behind only a haunting sound — a voice message in which she can be heard counting, counting, counting. Convinced that Ellie’s disappearance is connected to the arcane mathematical formulae inscribed in the walls and doors of the house, Keira embarks on a quest to bring her daughter home ...
Written and directed by Brendan Muldowney, certainly can’t be faulted for its ambition: while it opens as a fairly standard haunted house flick, the story gradually broadens out to encompass parallel dimensions, 12th-century alchemy, Old Testament imagery and the work of the pioneering quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who fled Nazi Austria for Ireland in 1938.
Some of these gambits are more persuasive than others, but Elisha Cuthbert is reliably steady as she navigates the bewildering labyrinth, tortured by the guilt of abandoning her daughter (in an ironic twist, Keira and Eoin are busy at work preparing a report on the teenage demographic when their own teenage girl goes missing).
There’s strong support from Dylan Fitzmaurice Brady as the young Steven, whose character could very easily have wandered in from a Stephen King story (there’s even a brief nod to ), and Brendan Muldowney maintains a crisp air of spooky tension that finally erupts into full-blown existential horror.
(cinema release)
