NOTE: This review contains spoilers.
I remember seeing a short film years back called The Ten Steps. Released in 2004 and set in Ireland, a young girl is watching her brother alone at night while her parents are out to dinner with the father’s new boss. When the lights go out, she calls her parents, who instruct her to go down to the cellar and turn on the circuit breaker to get them back on. She’s freaked out, so her father gets on the phone and tells her not to worry—there are only ten steps to the bottom. He assures her that he’ll count with her as she descends. After the tenth step, she disappears into the dark abyss as her detached, vacant voice hauntingly drifts through the father’s receiver. As the credits roll, the young girl continues to count until you can hear her feet crunching on bones. It’s a terrific little short that lets the mind wander to some disturbing places. What is she stepping on? Why does she keep counting? The short, nowadays, has aged, but remains nothing short of unsettlingly eerie.
The Ten Steps was created by Irish filmmaker Brendan Muldowney, who now, almost twenty years later, is releasing a full-length movie with Shudder based on this plotline titled The Cellar. Unfortunately, the beauty of 2004’s The Ten Steps was the mystery of it all, and by creating an explanation without a strong storyline and dialogue, The Cellar loses its magic. That enticing, unsettling eeriness dissipates into a muddled mess.
The Cellar follows Keira Woods (Elisha Cuthbert), an American mother to an Irish family who has just moved into a towering old home that they acquired for cheap at auction. The Woods’ eldest daughter, Ellie (Abby Fitz), is disdainful and resents the move, immediately put off by the home—and in particular, the cellar. Similar to the short film, Keira and her husband Brian (Eoin Macken) leave Ellie to watch her younger brother Steven (Dylan Brady) while they attend a late-night work meeting. The lights go out, Ellie goes down the stairs to the cellar to turn the lights back on, and over the phone with Keira, she disappears. Frantic to find her daughter and suspicious of their new home’s past, Keira goes on a warpath to find answers.
What’s frustrating about The Cellar is that, well, there really was no need for it. The short film was already great. We didn’t need a slow-moving, weak explanation as to why Ellie disappears, or why she can’t stop counting. On top of it all, the explanation that we do get in The Cellar is not clearly thought out nor illustrated.
DYLAN BRADY (LEFT) AND ELISHA CUTHBERT IN “THE CELLAR.”
The story needed work and often got entangled within itself. The ending, in which Keira and her family are stuck in the abyss, always counting, earned an audible “wait, what?” from me. So where did Ellie go in the first place? Who were those other souls that were counting in the lines? They couldn’t have been previous house owners, could they? For a feature-length film that was meant to explain the original short further, there was too much uncertainty to make it a solid movie.
Despite my critique, The Cellar has potential in its actors—most notably Cuthbert. It was exciting to see her return to the horror genre, and she plays a concerned, loving mother to the best of her ability. You can see how hard she’s trying, but the feeble script can’t quite get her where she needs to be. The style of The Cellar is stunning as well, shot to be moody, damp, and atmospheric—the house is stunning and creepy, and Ireland served as a fantastically ethereal backdrop. Unfortunately, these factors didn’t excuse the writing.
I adore Shudder and almost all that they create, but unfortunately, The Cellar just couldn’t quite make the cut.
The Cellar
2022
dir. Brendan Muldowney
94 min.
Now available on Shudder and in theaters.
