31°C
Partly cloudy
Fri
29°C
Sat
29°C
Sun
29°C

Powered by WeatherAPI.com

USD $1 ₱ 56.28 0.0000 March 27, 2024
March 26, 2024
Lotto 6/42
172330274012
₱ 9,522,382.20
2D Lotto 5PM
2514
₱ 4,000.00

Very Little Happens in ‘The Disappointments Room’

The film largely carries on with bursts of weirdness that don't really feel dangerous.

The Disappointments Room tells the story of married couple Dana and David (Kate Beckinsale and Mel Raido), who are moving with their young son Lucas to an old house in the Southern countryside. The house is a fixer-upper, and Dana, an architect, is in charge of repairing the place. As she goes about her business, however, she begins having terrifying dreams, and hearing things moving in the wilderness nearby. She discovers a locked room in the attic, and when she opens it, she unleashes something that brings back painful memories and takes her to a pretty unstable place mentally.

Half of the movie elapses before it actually gets to explaining the concept of the disappointments room. And even when that idea is finally deployed, there isn't really a whole lot that happens. Usually, the problem with many of these haunted house movies is that it doesn't make sense that the residents don't just move out of the house. Here, the problem is that they don't even have reason to do that. The film largely carries on with bursts of weirdness that don't really feel dangerous. The few times something violent does happen, the movie quickly reveals that it didn't really happen.

It becomes tedious pretty quickly. The story is basically set up as parallel mysteries. The first mystery involves the house's dark past, and what exactly happened in that room. The other mystery is what exactly happened with Dana in the recent past that has caused her to be so unstable. The answers for both come pretty late into the movie. The film seems more interested in the details of a repair job being done on the roof of the house than elaborating on the supposedly deep emotional ties that these characters have with the two main threads.

This is ostensibly a horror movie of sorts, but there isn’t much in here that one might consider scary. Even taken on a very basic visual level, the movie fails to provide anything that might register a reaction. It just fumbles through this plot, holding off on actually moving the story forward for the sake of further obscuring the big reveals at the end of the movie. And so, the film largely ends up delivering scenes of nothing. It keeps suggesting that there is something somewhere, but it invariably reveals that there was really nothing there at all.

The one the film has going for it is the house. It has all the personality that the film doesn’t have. It has a set of spiral stairs that make for a nice little reoccurring image, the film at times able to build a measure of tension in just having a character run down them frantically. But in the end, it’s just a house. There have been creepier houses in cinema history. Kate Beckinsale gets to display a messy range of emotions in the lead role. She puts up a good fight, but there is just nothing to this story.

Advertisement

The Disappointments Room is essentially a story of people hiding away harsh realities that cause them pain. It’s actually kind of clever in concept, the film juxtaposing two very different attempts to do that. But that’s all it is: a concept. The movie never really gets around to turning that idea into a story worth telling. The film could accurately be described as a movie about a woman trying to fix an old house. There is so little that happens that home repair takes precedence for long stretches of the movie.

My Rating:

Related Content

Movie Info

The Disappointments Room
Drama, Thriller
User Rating
3.0/5
2 users
Your Rating
Rate
Critic's Rating
1.5/5
Read review

Share the story

Advertisement
Advertisement

Recent Posts

Hot Off the Press