'The Cellar' isn't worth opening

Keira Woods (Elisha Cuthbert) and her husband Brian (Eoin Macken) move into an old house in Ireland with the hope of rebuilding their business and staving off financial ruin. However, the house's cellar holds a dark and powerful entity and when their daughter (Abby Fitz) disappears into the cellar, Keira must venture after her in order to find her...

As genres go, Ireland has enjoyed some excellent horrors in recent years as our national cinema has moved away from kitchen-sink dramas towards genre efforts.

'Extra Ordinary' took full advantage of the natural blending of horror and comedy with a cracking turn by Maeve Higgins and Will Forte, while 'The Hole In The Ground' mined our rich folklore for unsettling moods and story. 'The Cellar', unfortunately, lacks humour and a sense of place from its script. While it's filmed in Roscommon and uses Clonalis House as its setting - renamed Xaos House for the movie - there's very little to suggest that 'The Cellar' has anything really keeping it set in Ireland. It could have been shot anywhere, but it just so happens to be here.

The story is so rote, in fact - young daughter goes missing in cellar, family realises the house holds lots of spooky secrets, tries to get daughter of cellar - that odds are you've seen some kind of variation on this before, done much better. Though Tom Comerford's cinematography gives it a lush, vibrant feel to it, 'The Cellar' is much too grey and flat for its own good. Even the head-spinner of a final act barely registers.

It's to Elisha Cuthbert's credit that she gives such effort to an otherwise flat, tepid story that is bogged down by minutiae in the story and reams of endless exposition and backfilling lore. Had the script been stronger and the premise more original, there might have been something to talk about here. In fact, horror is such a populous genre these days that you really have to come up with something fresh and original in order for it to catch on. There are moments in 'The Cellar' that feel so cliched you almost wonder if writer / director Brendan Muldowney had initially envisaged the movie as some kind of comedy that played with audience expectations.

Sadly, 'The Cellar' doesn't live up to the promise of Muldowney's previous effort, medieval chase thriller 'Pilgrimage', which featured an excellent cast that included a pre-fame Tom Holland, Richard Armitage, and Jon Bernthal. The atmosphere gets sucked out of 'The Cellar' with its unoriginal story and setting, not to mention the impressive but ultimately overbearing score from Stephen McKeon.

In the end, 'The Cellar' offers up nothing new, and even the most die-hard horror fans will find nothing of note here.