La Chambre des oubliés

Long shelved (filmed in 2014, unreleased until 2016) this cannot decide if it wants to be a haunted house flick, a psychological thriller, family drama, or a routine slasher movie, as a couple, still reeling from the death of their infant daughter, relocate, with their young son, to a remote mansion, for unexplained reasons.

Weird things begin happening immediately, but the film implies it may all be in wifey's mind. The discovery of a hidden room, and a black dog prowling the grounds takes the plot into generic possession/ haunting territory, but dead daughter subplot takes it into tragedy/ family drama territory. We are introduced to who I believe was intended to be the token psychic woman, who disappeared as quickly as she appeared, which lead me to wonder why she was even there. Twice the film tried to bring a third party/ love interest into the plot, before dropping one completely, and killing the other, without anything further being mentioned about him.

This entire film is like that, with seemingly only the beginning of its plot threads being explored, then dropped entirely. The film never climaxes, so much as it just stops, with nothing remotely close to closure to any of its numerous plot threads.

Well acted, and there is enough atmosphere in the Gothic home, but whole chunks of the plot seem to have been edited out prior to release, giving the film an unsatisfactory, unfinished feel.

Its movies like this that make you realize that sometimes, you can judge a movie by its title

The Disappointments Room is a disappoi...

See what I did there? I delivered the exact line you expected only I half-a**ed it. That in a nutshell is The Disappointments Room; it sets itself up to deliver nothing but the bare minimum and then doesn't even deliver on that. I automatically assumed this film was less than a blip on the radar. A small budget, small minded, small expectation snoozefest comparable to this year's The Other Side of the Door (2016). So imagine my surprise when the credits revealed the movie was directed by D.J. Caruso, the same guy who made Disturbia (2007). What the heck man? What the actual heck?

The plot, for what it's worth, concerns itself with a small family of New Yorkers who have moved to the American South to renovate an old antebellum mansion. While touring the grounds Dana (Beckinsale) our intrepid architect, notices a part of the house that's not in the actual blueprints. She prods further, locating the key to the room and deciding what the hay; let's open it up. What she doesn't know is the room also hides secrets that may anger the mansion's ghostly inhabitants and test the limits of her sanity.

The film strains mightily to fit every basic haunted house cliché. They include but are not limited to: ghosts standing behind their victims, toys magically appearing, elaborate apparition flashback mode and pets prematurely meeting their demise. Those clichés are then complimented with the sloppiest of editing and laziest of jump scares providing a movie completely lacking atmosphere. What's worse is this faded out dollhouse of a movie comes complete with a boring assemblage of shallow traits and neuroses masquerading as characters, which are thrown about with little regard for perspective, personality or motivation.

The most laughable of these paltry characters is Kate Beckinsale as Dana, whose lip-quivering mother in emotional recovery rings egregiously false. She saunters through scenes looking perturbed and has her share of bad dreams which is to be expected. Yet when the film reveals possible psychosis and carelessly lumbers towards a splashy confrontation, it's clear Beckinsale is drowning in a cesspool of offensively bad schizophrenia tropes.

This movie was not fun to watch...no surprise there. But it's also no fun to review. There's nothing resembling the ponderous hubris of Warner Bros's DCEU or the desperate "love me, please" attitude of Independence Day: Resurgence (2016). There's no hilariously bad reasoning like in God's Not Dead 2 (2016) or drive-by bellicose like in 13 Hours (2016). The Disappointments Room is the movie equivalent of flat skunk beer. Any processes that were once teaming with life are now dead and baking in the sun, making your patio smell like cat p***.

Nothing happens in this film. There are no consequences to sift through, no conclusions to be drawn, no lessons to be learned. If the opposite of love isn't hate but indifference, than the fact that I left this movie feeling nothing should be a testament to just how bad this thing is.

See if this synopsis sounds familiar: Dana and David Barrow have moved with their son Lucas to a house on the countryside to re-start their lives. Dana, who is an architect, is looking forward to redecorate their new living, but before long, something feel amiss. She seems to be seeing ghosts in the house, which initially is quickly dismissed as her having violent hallucinations from a recent loss, but then she discovers that the house has a sordid history, one that may come and haunt her and her family.

Everyone who has ever seen movies with haunted houses or families struggling with grief can see that they put The Woman in Black, The Sixth Sense, The Grudge, Antichrist, Poltergeist and The Orphanage into a blender for this film. One scene in particular with a boy and a creepy girl in a hallway seems directly lifted from the mother of all haunted house movies, The Shining. Now that could be seen as a respectful homage, but where some filmmakers like J.J. Abrams can combine elements from other movies into something exciting that at least feels fresh, the makers of this jumbled mess of clichés from better movies only produced a bland concoction with a bad aftertaste.

This cannot be pinned on one faulty element in particular, as the lazy script by D.J. Caruso and Wenthworth MIller, Caruso's uninspired direction and the extremely messy editing all carry a big part of the blame for why this movie feels so disjointed and meaningless. It is no secret that big chunks of the movie were edited out (explaining a meager running time of 91 minutes), and it shows. The story sets up several plot points that are simply abandoned later in the movie: for example, there is a subplot featuring a boy, a cat and a big dog that is solely used for cheap shocks and manipulated emotion, because it plays no role in the resolution of the story whatsoever.

All that happens seems to be in service of predictable scenes that aren't tense or suspenseful, since they lack a steady hand in direction, and everything can be seen coming from miles away. It all culminates in a ridiculous dinner scene that should have been the pay-off from previously established emotions and storylines, but since so much information and character development seems missing, it fails miserably. And it is topped only by a 'finale' that is so laughably weak, abrupt and unsatisfying that it gives new meaning to the term 'anti-climax'. As if writers and director couldn't come up with a good ending, so they didn't bother to write one, and just skipped to the end credits.

Kate Beckinsale is at the center of the story, and at least she does a decent effort to keep the viewers interested, something which can't be said of Mel Raido as David, whose wooden performance almost resembles an alien trying to do an impression of a human. Lucas Till's only reason for being here seems to create unease, and he also disappears from the story before he can do something meaningful. If there is some praise, it goes to the photography and the music, which both give the movie some edge over other B-horror movies.

Really a missed opportunity for D.J. Caruso, who has shown with Taking Lives and Disturbia that he could make a suspenseful movie.

Saw the movie today. I enjoyed watching Kate Beckinsale and I believe she made her character believable, you feel what the character is going through. However, this was supposed to be a HORROR, not a drama on Lifetime Movie Network. Some revelations are made before the middle of the movie and the pace just slowed and there were no more surprises or plot development. You know that part of a horror movie where the evildoing of the antagonist, the fighting back of the protagonist create a crescendo of visceral emotions in the viewer leading to a catharsis and release, that never happens. There were more than a couple of jump-scares but the possibilities from the plot and the characters just were not followed through and explored enough for the horror to happen for me. Nice story though and definitely worth a watch if you like scary TV dramas.