When her daughter goes missing after venturing into the cellar of their new home, Kiera (Elisha Cuthbert) uncovers terrifying secrets concerning the history of their house and the diabolical practices of its previous inhabitant… Written and directed by Brendan Muldowney, The Cellar is based on his spine-chilling short film The Ten Steps (2004), which depicts a young girl’s haunting descent into the cellar of her home during a power-cut. This moment comes at the beginning of The Cellar, and from here Muldowney opens out the story to follow the mother’s frantic search and unearthing of the sinister history of the house.
With elements of HP Lovecraft’s Dreams in the Witch House and William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderlands, The Cellar is an immensely creepy, atmospheric work. It deviates from run of the mill haunted house narratives with its intriguing use of occult mysticism and mathematical alchemy to twist the laws of time and space. Spoiler alert: the previous owner of the house dabbled in a cacophony of dark practices to break down the boundaries of reality and open a gateway to Hell. It’s worth noting that the film was shot in Roscommon, where it’s said a cave beneath an ancient stone monument called Oweynagat (‘Cave of the Cats’) serves as a doorway to Hell which opens at Samhain, when the veil between worlds is at its frailest. This intersection of contemporary life with ancient rituals and beliefs is a recurring feature of Irish horror cinema, and imbues titles like The Cellar with a rich, haunting power. Logic and reason are nearly always usurped by chaos and the mystical...
Muldowney’s screenplay reveals things gradually, moodily, and is enhanced by his considerably measured pacing. The sinister nature of the house and its previous owner are stealthily uncovered, darkening the atmosphere and upping the tension. While the slow-burn approach enables us to sink into the film’s deliciously dark ambiance, the wealth of ideas introduced keeps things moving along. Intriguing notions, such as the use of mathematical equations and witchcraft to uncover and open extra spatial dimensions, serve to deepen the mystery, as demonology and cosmic horror swirl together. The house itself, which we (perhaps fittingly) never really get a proper feel for, features alchemical symbols and Hebrew-glyphs carved above every doorway, which when translated, spell the word ‘Leviathan’. When the police investigation returns no answers to her daughter's disappearance, Kiera opens her mind and turns to the occult for guidance.
While there are a couple of flat performances, and the characters are never really as fleshed out or emotionally raw as they could be, Cuthbert equips herself well as a determined woman who gradually realises she can’t rely on anyone, and that she must literally descend into the depths of Hell alone to find her missing daughter. The depiction of the demon that stalks through the house and the dimensional portals within it, is a striking one. It resembles the goat-headed figure of Baphomet as depicted in magician Éliphas Lévi's tome Dogma and Ritual of High Magic. Baphomet is a malevolent entity in Western occult and mystical traditions, and it’s a striking sight which Muldowney, for the most part, keeps suggestive and shadowy. The orchestral score by Stephen McKeon is suitably ominous, using choral pieces to unsettling effect, and at times diabolically bombastic, enhancing the increasingly delirious atmosphere as reality fractures and Hell looms into view.
Running parallel to the shifting realities within the house are ideas concerning communication, interpersonal relationships, and technological isolation. Even before the Hell-dimension in the basement begins to play havoc with their lives, the Woods family, like a lot of people, engage excessively with technology and social media. They may share the same space, but there is little interaction or engagement between them because they are all lost in their own individual online worlds. When he isn’t playing pranks on his sister, young son Steven (Dillon Fitzmaurice Brady) confines himself to his room playing video games. Parents Brian (Eoin Macken) and Kiera work in online marketing (something to do with strategies and branding), and it is due to their work that they are absent when Ellie (Abby Fitz) ventures into the cellar looking for the fuse box (don’t they have Zoom in Roscommon?!). Brian and Kiera admit to each other that they don’t know Ellie very well, and that they still see her as a child. Struggling to adjust to the family's relocation, Ellie uses social media to keep in touch with her friends, though she has been a victim of cyber-bullying. The idea of social media is to connect people, but sometimes it just serves to alienate and isolate. It’s a whole other world people disappear into, become trapped within, where appearances are deceiving and where truth is questionable and unknowable. Talk about your own private hell! Muldowney draws uncanny parallels between esotericism and the virtual worlds accessed through the internet and social media, where certain knowledge and information is only discoverable and given meaning by the prefixing and use of various symbols (i.e. # or @). The disconnect between the family is gradually mirrored in the extra-dimensional realms that appear within the house, as characters become separated, disappearing in one place, only to momentarily reappear in another part of the house, never really actually being there or being able to engage with anyone.
Even though it doesn't have quite the same impact as the short film it's based on, The Cellar is a supremely creepy and beguiling film that smoulders its way to a fittingly bleak conclusion. One to watch in the dark...