If I were to rate The Cellar exclusively on one of it’s ideas, it’d be a stellar rave. But that idea is so subsumed by mediocre attempts at atmosphere and scares that no amount of clever inception can make this a good film.

The flick is about a family who moves into a ridiculously oversized house for their family of four. Before you can say “Cube meets Poltergeist”, their eldest daughter vanishes while going into… The Cellar. Now the mother will follow the clues and do the math to find her.

Yeah, this movie has an intriguing premise in the house as a puzzle box. There’s mysterious symbols over the doors and a weird mathematical formula inscribed on the floor of the cellar. This house was built as a mystery that she has to solve. A mathematician is brought in who talks about the formula is describing alternate dimensions and Schrodinger’s Cat is referenced… and all of this window dressing interests me a great deal. Not many spook show movies have ideas, much less dubious scientific ones.

But it’s kind of just window dressing for a movie that’s all setup, no spices. Most of this intrigue goes nowhere as our characters stumble around the house, get frightened by something rapping, something tapping on the cellar door. It’s a lot of haunted house type setup that does lead somewhere (eventually… <looks at watch>, but at such a glacial pace, full of desperate attempts at mood setting, and pointless time-wasting scares.

This is a clever idea wrapped around a nothing-burger of a movie. The idea of the puzzle box house is a good one and I wish they had come up with something better to do with it.

Score: 68