Unless someone can come up with a fresh angle, I think there should be a moratorium put on haunted house movies. We’ve had ghosts scaring families that move into old creepy mansions, people who don’t realize they are ghosts, and folks who willingly identify with specters and cross over to become one. Along with parodies, that pretty much sums up all the different takes I’m aware of where “things that go bump in the night” are concerned. I’m sad to report that director D.J. Caruso is unable to serve up a new variation on this theme with The Disappointments Room, a movie that tempts critical lambasting with its title and does itself no favors with a plot that simply throws one familiar trope after another at its audience but fails to develop them adequately as well.
David and Dana (Mel Raido and Kate Beckinsale) are seeking some peace and quiet after suffering a personal tragedy and look to move out of New York City to more peaceful surroundings. Wouldn’t you know it, they’re able to purchase a rambling old rattletrap of a home on sprawling grounds for practically nothing. Adding to the appeal is that fact that it needs a lot of work, something that will keep Dana, who happens to be an architect, occupied. However, her project throws her a curveball when she stumbles upon a room at the top of the house that’s not on the floor plan. It’s secluded, dark and throws off a bad, bad vibe. Soon Dana is seeing things, haunted by visions of a young girl being held in the room by an imposing figure (Gerald McRaney).
If you’ve seen only one haunted house movie, this should still sound depressingly familiar and it should come as no surprise that our heroine’s husband doesn’t believe a thing she says regarding these visions. What’s odd is that their son (Duncan Joiner) is never put in jeopardy or can’t sense the supernatural beings around him. So credit Caruso and cowriter Wentworth Miller for not including at least one familiar element.
The most frustrating thing about the film is that it does contain an intriguing premise and nothing is done with it. Disappointment rooms actually existed in the South during the last 19 th and early 20 th century, their purpose being a hiding place for children who were born physically or mentally disabled. Often they would die, neglected, in these hiding places. This sort of tragic circumstance is ripe for a horror film and yet the disappointment room is treated as an afterthought most of the time. Also, the suggestion that a huge beast roams the grounds is never developed, very little history is provided regarding the previous occupants of the house and the ending isn’t much of ending at all; it’s as if Caruso and Miller threw up a white flag of surrender after being unable to come up with anything inspired.
If the film has one good thing going for it, it’s Beckinsale who throws herself fully into her role. The actress puts herself through the wringer what with the many emotional ups and downs Dana endures and a sequence in which she is drunk and reveals all that’s troubling her is a great piece of work in a very bad movie. That her co-star Raido is completely ineffectual doesn’t help. It seems as though once the title was assigned to this feature it was doomed to live up to it.
Contact Chuck Koplinski at [email protected].
