Horror needs an enema. When a film like The Witch, with its slow burning power and increasingly unsettling atmosphere, is considered arthouse then the genre, especially in the mainstream, needs a serious cleanse of bad habits. Because this is what horror is supposed to do.
Like most contemporary horror The Other Side of the Door (with its 15A when horror really should be 18s) doesn’t earn its boo moments. There’s no creeping dread, no teasing out the tension – it’s quick pan, loud noise. There’s no sequence building because there’s no emotional continuity – what has happened in one scene has no bearing on the character’s actions and feelings in the next. This is such a shame because The Other Side of the Door starts out quite well.
Maria (Callies) and Michael (Sisto) are a couple living in India with their daughter Lucy (Rosinsky). Maria has been unable to get over the death of their son Oliver (Logan Creran) who, in a difficult but wonderfully realised scene, drowns in a sinking car when Maria leaves him and rescues Lucy. Understanding nanny Piki (Pillai) informs the depressed Maria that if she spreads Oliver’s ashes on the steps of the temple near Piki’s village, Maria can speak to his spirit through the temple doors. She is forbidden to open the door but Maria does exactly that. Oliver’s spirit returns to the house but this Oliver just ain’t right…
So what we have here is a horror about a supernatural creature that is the manifestation the fractured psyche of the protagonist (á la recent horrors The Canal, The Babadook, The Witch, and Citadel), which is always a tantalising premise. Maria’s situation is wholly sympathetic and her guilt and depression are understandable. She is at first happy to have ‘Oliver’ back, reading him The Jungle Book at night and ignoring the odd goings on (the fish in the pond die, the lush green garden turns a sickly brown).
But after setting this up and getting the audience invested, director Johannes Roberts (Storage 24) becomes bored with the nuances Maria’s psychotic break and the effect it has on her marriage and her daughter. He moves the film into territory covered by The Entity (Callies resembles Barbara Hershey a little), then The Omen and finally The Exorcist. He’s less interested too in properly stitching together scenes: one episode has Maria chased around the garden by a stop-motion skeletal woman thing with ghostly tribal men looking on and literally twenty seconds later – not the next day - she’s having a conversation with Piki.
Initially decent before descending into contemporary horror’s tropes, The Other Side of the Door fails to build on an interesting first act.