The Other Side of the Door is one of those horror movies where the protagonists seem to be incapable of making any good decisions. One may give the characters a little leeway, as they’re dealing with the often irrational reasoning that may come with grieving dead children. But there comes a point where it becomes too difficult to swallow, the protagonists of this story going above and beyond the normal silliness that tends to come with horror movies.
Michael and Maria (Jeremy Sisto and Sarah Wayne Callies) live in Mumbai. A while back, Maria was in a car accident with their two kids. She managed to save her daughter, but lost her son. Since then, she's been struggling to just get through every day. A woman that works for the couple tells her of a temple hidden in the forest outside a small village, where Maria will be able to speak to her son one last time. Maria carries out the ritual, but doesn't follow all the rules. Oliver appears to have followed her back, and though she is initially happy with this development, she soon learns that there is something else going on as well.
The initiating action of this movie involves the main character believing in something beyond her understanding. She puts aside all her skepticism and makes this difficult trip to a faraway place where she is to perform a complicated ritual. And yet, later, when she is told that maybe having the ghost of her son around isn't a good thing, that there may be terrible consequences lurking around the corner, she shrugs it off. This is after she has already seen all manner of terrible things. She has already encountered various horrors, proof that something evil is occurring. And yet, she doesn't do anything. She doesn’t tell Michael what’s going on, in spite of how it might affect their family as a whole.
You could wave this away as the white people in the story just being typically unable to confront the supernatural, all the foreign strangeness for which they have no reference point. But there is also a part in this film where the woman who tells Maria about the ritual, the one who warns her about what could go wrong, ends up falling for a really obvious supernatural trick. This is the character who knows everything, but even she ends up losing all of her rational abilities for the sake of moving this film’s plot forward.
The film does gain a little bit from being set in India, though there is more than a twinge of exoticization at play here. And through it all, the movie never really manages to be very creepy. The film’s scares are pretty mild, and suffer from a lack of purpose. This is another one of those threats that don't really have much of a goal in mind. It is always strange when a spirit uses its limited existence on this plane to just kind of jostle things around. The acting is okay, but these characters are pretty limiting.
The Other Side of the Door is a tedious piece of work. The film has the benefit of the vast mythology and spiritualism of a completely different place, and it squanders it on dumb characters that pretty much earn all their suffering. The movie drifts aimlessly, knowing where it wants to go but not how to get there. Rather than do the narrative work, it just makes its character unbearably dumb. That’s not the way to go.
My Rating:
