The Disappointments Room

I had high hopes for the first half of this movie, but it just falls into a jumble in the last half. So many unanswered questions; a random kite, a random carpenter,etc..

If you want to see a classic with a similar story line, but done much, much better, check out The Changeling, bone chilling Canadian movie from 1980 with George C Scott. Don't be fooled by it's age, it's scary. You can even see it on youtube for free: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVttK509_JI .....it's basically everything this movie is trying to be except....you know, it makes sense.

Oh yeah, we know the type. September and January releases are generally known as movie dump months, after a busy period of cinema releases. A lot of the films released in this time period are films studios just needed to stick in to release. Generally these films are not good. The Disappointments Room does not go against the mold. After I watched the film I was kind of hoping I didn't as it pretty much offered nothing worthwhile during its entire duration.

The film is about a mother (played by the lovely Kate Beckinsale), her son and husband who move into a house where creepy occurrences take hold. She soon discovers a "disappointments room" in the attic where children with special needs or deformities were locked up. The spirits of the past start haunting her and she has a hard time separating reality from this new world she unlocked. Its a typical horror premise. Can I even call this horror? There isn't one scare in the film. Nothing that will stay with you. There aren't even any jump scares. In this day and age you'd expect something startling from a horror film but nothing really ever comes. As the film progresses you want to stomach less and less of it. If you've seen as many horror films as I have, you want something original, ambitious, or frighteningly entertaining. Unfortunately, this rarely happens.

I love Kate Beckinsale. She's an ageless beauty who I love watching on screen. I'd say she's the only reason you'd want to check this film out. She needs to pick better stuff for herself. She's been in some bad stuff but shes just wasted here. The guy who played her husband seemed like a caricature, his line delivery seemed so forced. He was basically the prototypical husband who doesn't see whats going on. Lucas Till was an entirely useless and creepy in the wrong kind of way character. I don't like the idea for the film but there could have been better delivery. Wish-washy editing of a bunch of "scary" images jumbled together is not enough to be memorable.

I know its my fault for getting sucked into this (damn you sexy Kate Beckinsale!) but as an avid film lover I'm always willing to give everything a chance in search of finding an inspired work. There's no inspiration here. Just a tired picture filled with nothing essential. You'll find scarier things in your day to day life than this mediocre effort. Skip it. There's too many puns I can do with the title of this film to convey how bad it is but I'll save you all the torture.

4/10

For me the movie seems to suffer mostly from it trying to be two things without being really good at being one thing.

I went into the movie expecting a ghost story. What I ended up seeing is this some sort of psychological thriller staring Kate Beckinsale. She plays a architect who moves into a new house in the country with her family in order to get over the lost of a child, when she discovers a previous owner also lost their child on the same day and are hunting the room that they kept this child, who was a deformed girl born to a well to do family that wanted to keep their shame under wraps.

Kate Beckinsale does a really good job at playing a woman distressed over loosing a child. Most movies don't usually show this part of the break down, as her character develops a drinking habit, starts looking at her husband differently, to the point that a new man has a chance to interfere with the relationship, and she's becoming distance from the child she still has, in most movies this happens before that family moves into the house, but hear it actual seems to be happening during.

What takes away from this performance is the uneven dual plots with the ghost of their new home hunting Beckinsale's character, driving her crazy by putting ideas into her head about her feelings towards her dead child.

Having two movies in one can sometimes work (Like it did in From Dust Still Dawn), but here I feel the filmmakers never were quite sure about what they wanted the movie to be, which really effected it poorly.

When naming your film I would not use and adjective like poor, bad or say disappointment because unless it is really good can come back to bite you. This film uses Disappointments Room and it was very disappointing. I thought it may be interesting, but boy I was completely wrong. Just very poor pacing and editing in this thing. There were times multiple things were happening and I had no idea what was going on. The father was making dinner with two guests while the wife was looking at the hired hand doing something and then this and that happened and I was wondering what the point of this and that was. It was an okay concept and could have worked, but the execution could not have been any more horrid, who the heck do they have writing the scripts to these things? I will say that the film at least looked good and though it was not by a major studio the film at least looked like it was a big Hollywood studio film.

The story has an architect and her husband and son moving into a house that is in pretty rough shape. A very big house, because everyone in real life finds the most broken down looking house they can to move into even though banks kind of frown upon that as do inspectors. Well, the architect has something on her mind as something very predictable has occurred and now strange things are happening in her new house and she soon discovers a strange room not in the blueprints and immediately finds a key and gets told what it is with almost no build up. Soon she is visited by a handyman who seems to serve absolutely no purpose in the film and thankfully the film is over really quickly.

The film just has so many problems. The story is atrocious, how do you make a movie about a room and then make the discovery and getting into the room so anticlimactic? I was expecting the film to progress to an ending that had the main character finally getting into the room to discover a horror like no other. Another problem is the annoying son and father and the pointless handyman that kept flirting and in the end served no purpose. Neither did the one old lady at the library, there is literally a junction where she is looking at old clippings about ghost killing people and then trying to call the architect, but then poof, she is gone too.

This film is a horror film that features ghosts, a haunted house and no payoff. The movie kind of just ends, though they do the obligatory look back and see the ghost standing at the window scene. I can see why this film bombed which is truly pathetic considering it only cost 15 million to make! The actors range from disinterested (Kate) to completely overacting and annoying (everyone else, especially that father). There are a couple of jump scares and a couple of nice gore shots, but overall, this film is a big disappointment.

"The Disappointments Room" follows an architect (Kate Beckinsale) reeling from a family tragedy who moves into a remote mansion in upstate New York with her husband and young son to restore it. She uncovers a hidden room in the house that does not appear on the floor plans, and begins experiencing increasingly disorienting visions of the home's original owners.

I have to admit that I was fairly excited by the trailers for this film; it promised nothing groundbreaking, but appeared by all accounts to be an at least entertaining Gothic throwback—and I'd assume the script would lead one to a similar assumption, but the film unfortunately is something of a self-sabotaging effort.

It starts out briskly and glides through the typical haunted house fare—family arrives at old mansion, wife notices strange things immediately off the bat; she may be unstable, or the husband may be oblivious; the child is in imminent danger. These tropes are thrown at the audience in succession throughout the first act of the film; enter the second half, and the film seems to turn on its head. The plot regarding the history of the secret room and the apparent spirits in the house is sidelined, and suddenly the film becomes an anemic psychological study of a broken woman. The intrigue—or at least what little there was of it—for all purposes disappears.

The last forty minutes of the film especially are marked by awkward, amateurish editing choices that break any sense of flow, and a frankly ho-hum performance from Beckinsale. This isn't to say she's a bad actress, but she certainly seems bored here. The husband character is essentially useless in the film, and Lucas Till comes in as a sexualized handyman in the last thirty minutes, far too late to introduce a character that is apparently supposed to have some significance to the plot. By the end of the film, I was wondering where the narrative was attempting to take me—through the journey of a traumatized woman? Through a family that's falling apart? Through a haunted house? I still don't quite know, as the film fails to commit to any of the above in a genuine way. The last scene ties things together in a neat package, but there is no sense of relief or catharsis.

Overall, "The Disappointments Room" was a letdown (yes, I'm going to avoid the pun). In spite of the wonky editing, bad pacing, and general lack of narrative direction, the worst part of it all was that I honestly feel there is a good film somewhere in here; not an innovative one, or even a great one, but at least a good one— one that is capable of delivering a straightforward Gothic horror story without imploding on itself. One of the few things the film gets right is the atmosphere, and its most noteworthy scene comes at the end in the form of a disturbing Victorian-era flashback. Aside from that, "The Disappointments Room" is a lost opportunity. 4/10.