The “Bluebeard”-like hook of splendors granted on one condition — never, ever enter a household’s specific forbidden zone — raises expectations of a spooky, macabre good time. Those expectations are almost entirely thwarted by “Cellar Door,” even to the degree of our never actually peeking behind the titular locked portal. Starring Jordana Brewster and Scott Speedman as a couple gifted luxe new digs with the aforementioned proviso, Vaughn Stein’s thriller is too simplistic and implausible to provide any chills. But despite some lurid eventual plot elements, it’s also too blandly slick in a TV-movie mode to offer much trashy fun. Lionsgate launches the feature in limited U.S. theaters plus on-demand platforms on Nov. 1.
The Winters are an innocuously attractive and devoted yuppie couple lent little distinguishing personality here by performers or script. John (Speedman) is a valued employee at an architecture firm; Sera (Brewster) a mathematics prof as well as accomplished pianist. They’ve been trying to conceive a first child for some time. When success at last ends in a crushing miscarriage, the pair decide they need a fresh start, leaving central Portland, Ore., for the suburbs.
They have no luck finding a home until they’re introduced to the mysterious Emmett Claybourne (Laurence Fishburne), a gentleman of the old school living in a 1918 Jacobean Revival manse on a gated estate. Claiming to have a talent for matching the right people with the right abode, he insists they stay for dinner, then overnight. In the morning, they find him gone, though he has left paperwork promising them this very spread as their own, gratis. The only caveat is … well, you guessed it, never trespassing beyond the sealed cellar door.
John is skeptical, finding all this a little too good to be true. But Sera is ecstatic, deciding they’ve been gifted a “perfect life” they’d be foolish to refuse. (While these characters no doubt command decent salaries, it seemingly never occurs to anyone that in real life the upkeep costs alone on this nearly palace-scaled place and its grounds would be astronomical.) Of course, John’s doubts immediately begin to fuel an obsessive curiosity about the verboten cellar, especially once it’s learned that Emmett’s own family disappeared from the premises long ago, and other occupants since fled after curiously brief residencies. When the Winters throw a party, it’s crashed by one such distraught ex-tenant (Chris Conner), who warns of the house “You gotta burn it down before it’s too late…it will destroy you.”
But the supernatural menace hinted at proves less immediate than threats posed by John’s coworker Alyssa (Addison Timlin), with whom he had an affair that predated his marriage — but also relapsed a couple times afterward. She’s your classic “woman scorned,” à la “Fatal Attraction,” determined to ruin his life if he won’t spend it with her. She files a bogus sexual harassment complaint, getting him suspended at work. This becomes one more thing he has to hide from his newly pregnant-again wife, realizing Emmett’s on-the-nose pronouncement, “Houses are like people, they all have their deep dark secrets.” As Alyssa’s vengeance grows even more aggressive, the possibilities of violence and of past sins hidden in the cellar naturally intertwine.
Briefly goosed by a step into cheesy retro erotic-thriller terrain around the two-thirds point, “Cellar Door” is otherwise frustratingly mild — the kind of movie whose cuss words you count afterward to figure out why it earned an “R.” It wouldn’t feel short on exploitative elements if more nuanced ones were present, like sinister atmospherics or complex character psychologies. But those factors are sorely lacking. There’s zero “olde dark house” creepiness to the environs here, which have been decorated in dull good taste by production designer Angela J. Smit and overlit as if for a lifestyle-magazine photo spread by DP Michael Merriman. A tenor more soap operatic than unsettling is furthered by Marlon E. Espino’s original score.
Nor can the actors find a way to enliven roles whose only stabs at depth are provided by some of the clumsiest passages in Sam Scott and Lori Evans Taylor’s screenplay. For instance, Sera’s university class lectures inexplicably reel from statistics to chaos theory and the “butterfly effect,” because apparently undergraduates need their math peppered with lofty life wisdom drawn from those concepts. Another figure gets a groaner monologue explaining that the house represents “a Faustian bargain … a perfect life all for the low, low cost of your soul.” Yet this occult edge goes entirely undeveloped. Instead, there’s an eventual pileup of scheming contrivances that require us to believe a character painted all along as sweetly uncomplicated was really harboring the deviousness of a criminal mastermind.
So much implausibility should at least be more entertaining than Stein (“Inheritance,” “Every Breath You Take”) makes it. In press materials, the director cites inspirations from Edgar Allan Poe to “Gone Girl,” “Rebecca” and “Rosemary’s Baby.” But while it’s one problem that those influences feel inorganically Frankensteined together in the script, another is that its execution lacks the esprit to make clashing elements work in terms of suspense or sheer style. This is a generically competent treatment of material that needed some lunatic conviction to transcend its weaknesses on the page. You know something has gone amiss when your biggest takeaway from a quasi-haunted-house story is, “Yes, the central location would certainly be suited for upscale weddings and receptions.”
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