The Disappointments Room

The Disappointments Room is a thriller in name only.  In reality, it's one of the more boring movies to hit in a while.  It has a suitably creepy haunted house setting, and seems to be building to an intriguing mystery early on.  But long before it's done, the mystery has been dropped for total confusion, tasteless scenes of children in peril, and an overall sense of indifference.  The only scary thing about it is that someone thought it was ready to be released, despite sitting on the studio shelf for well over a year.

To be fair, its release delay is not entirely the movie's fault.  The film's original distributor, Relativity, filed for bankruptcy last year, preventing it from being released in a timely fashion.  Still, that doesn't excuse how mind numbingly slow this film is.  Kate Beckinsale heads up the cast as Dana, a mother and architect from Brooklyn who is moving with her family to a large, broken down old mansion in the middle of nowhere to get a fresh start after a personal tragedy concerning their baby girl that we see brief flashes of throughout the film.  It's never really explained why her husband (Mel Raido, sporting one of the worst fake Brooklyn accents in recent memory) thinks that moving his wife and 5-year-old son (Duncan Joiner) to a creepy house that looks like it was designed to star in a horror movie will cheer his wife up.  It's in desperate need of repair, with leaky roofs and faulty electricity.  Maybe he thinks that if his wife gets caught up in fixing up the place, she'll forget her problems.

As soon as they move in, Dana decides to explore every nook and cranny of the house.  Should you be unwise enough to pay to watch this movie, get ready to see this a lot.  I'd wager at least 65% of the movie contains nothing but Kate Beckinsale slowly walking through halls and rooms while absolutely nothing happens.  In the attic, she comes across a door leading to a tiny closed off room that doesn't appear in the blueprints of the house.  Talking to a local historian, Dana finds out that it's a Disappointments Room - a place where people of high society would usually hide their children away if they were born with physical abnormalities.  She starts to have scary visions concerning that room, most of them revolving around the previous tenant of the house, the ominous Judge Blacker (Gerald McRaney), whose spirit likes to walk the grounds with a vicious attack dog, and apparently murdered a little girl who once inhabited the room.  At first these visions make Dana question her own sanity.  But when the vengeful spirit starts coming after her own son, she knows that the visions are real.

A movie like this needs a smart approach to work, as it deals with such heavy issues as personal loss, grieving, child murder and endangerment and how a personal tragedy can affect an entire family.  But director and co-writer D.J. Caruso (I Am Number Four) has no sense of suspense or atmosphere, so he instead resorts to B-grade tricks such as jump scares accompanied by loud noises on the soundtrack, or ghostly little girls who stare morosely at our heroine, but don't really do much else.  There is a mystery at the heart of the story that could be fun to solve if handled in the right way, but again, Caruso settles for confusion over answers.  There are certain moments that left me scratching my head.  At one point, Dana has a nightmarish vision of her young son being attacked by Blacker's vicious dog.  She races outside to save the boy, only to find him completely unharmed.  So, it was just a vision or a nightmare, right?  Yet, moments later, she stumbles upon Rascal the family cat's mutilated carcass in the woods surrounding the home.  So, was it the dog, or some other creature that killed it?  The movie's kind of vague on the details.

The Disappointments Room is filled with moments like that.  At one point, we see a character get killed by the evil spirit, their body left hanging from a tree, but it is never brought up again after that.  This is a movie filled with set ups without pay offs, and causes without effects.  It's a mess of ideas looking for structure, of which the plot offers none.  Equally messy are the performances, which range from the bland to the embarrassing.  Of particular note, a dinner party scene where Beckinsale finally loses it in front of her husband and two of her friends is one of the most badly acted single scenes of any movie this year.  I don't know if they play clips of the performances at the Razzie Awards, but should she be nominated, just a few seconds of the clip would have the audience howling.  It really needs to be seen to be believed.  Not that I recommend you do so.

This is a movie completely devoid of thrills and tension.  It's a lifeless, dreary, dead in the water experience that doesn't bother to raise the slightest amount of interest in the viewer.  In a season with Don't Breathe playing, there's no need to see this.  Even if that movie wasn't around, there still would be no need to see this.

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