[SXSW 2022 Review] The Cellar Succeeds When It Digs Into Cosmic Horror

What begins as a standard haunted house story becomes something more intriguing, if not perfectly executed, in writer/director Brendan Muldowney’s The Cellar. Ad agency creators Keira (Elisha Cuthbert) and Brian (Eoin Macken) move their family, including moody daughter Ellie (Abby Fitz) and precocious Steven (Dylan Fitzmaurice Brady) into a manor in the Irish countryside. Ellie is very upset she’s been ripped from her life and friends to live in an isolated and old house, filled with oddly placed runes and a dark and dank cellar that seems larger than it is. Steven is having too much fun exploring the home, which includes a secret room in his playroom that looks like it might have padded walls. 

As what normally happens in these films, Keira and Ellie have a falling out and their Keira vanishes. Keira and Brian create search parties and as time passes, the police and Brian believe she’s run off. But Keira was on the phone with Ellie when she vanished and she knows something more malicious is going on. And so she begins digging into the mysterious sayings etched into the house, as well as the runes or unfamiliar alphabet letters crafted into columns in the house and the reason there are numbers etched into the stairs in the cellar and the mystery behind the equation carved into the cellar’s floor. 

It’s here that The Cellar really gets interesting as the ghost story fades away to something more cosmic. Muldowney’s script touches on most of the ghost story tropes we’ve seen over and over again, from creepy basements to secret rooms, to possessed family members to the investigative piece that takes up most of the second act. And for awhile, I just nodded along with the plot, kind of anticipating the directions it would go, but my appreciation for the script and its mysteries deepened as the film approached the third act. 

The central mystery of where Ellie went sort of fades into the background as Keira becomes obsessed with numbers and mathematical equations. The way The Cellar focuses on equations that might open up the truth of the universe and might lead to different dimensions gives this small, mostly one location story a more epic direction than initially expected.  The Cellar incorporates cosmic horror writings popularized by H.P. Lovecraft and strips it back to the core, giving it a sparse makeover. When the film utilizes special effects, it can be hit or miss, such as the monstrous creature that appears at some points. 

The film does lean heavily into the sound design and Tom Comerford’s cinematography to make up for the fact we don’t actually get to see a whole lot. Yet it still manages to create some tension through the constant opening and closing of doors and descents into darkness. A surprisingly standout moment comes when Ellie is on the phone with Keira, walking into the darkness of the cellar and counting down the ten steps…but when she reaches the final step, her counting continues…

What begins as a typical haunted house story morphs into something much more interesting and the reveals that come in the back half of the story grabbed me where the somewhat generically spooky atmosphere did not. Some of the third act brought to mind A Dark Song and the way it uses a small budget to tackle larger concepts. It doesn’t completely work but once I got past the tepid ghost story, I found something more meaty and intriguing.