![]() At one point, her mother visits a university professor to help her crack a mysterious algorithm she found in the house. In contrast, The Cellar drags aimlessly past this scene, with any attempt to explain Ellie’s disappearance quickly devolving into empty extrapolation. Even upon rewatch, the 2004 short continues to feel fresh, an impressive exercise in inducing dread in the viewer as quickly as possible. Predictably, the one high point in the film is the scene that recreates the set-up of the short, wherein Ellie descends the basement’s steps. Drawn out and incorporating nonsensical occultist elements, The Cellar takes a great short and turns it into overwrought drivel. In this sense, it’s no surprise why the director felt the need to rehash this specific project-he’s simply trying to bank on the dread that effortlessly oozes from The Ten Steps. The Cellar’s narrative shortcomings feel all the more damning when the original short film was already so perfectly chilling. What follows is a dizzying concoction of a film, combining elements of investigative thrillers and generic Satanic silliness, neither connecting effectively to the other. When she gets there, however, there’s no trace of Ellie. She gets well past twenty before her mother ditches the office and races home. ![]() ![]() Oddly, though, Ellie keeps counting well past the tenth step. Her mother gets her to agree by promising to stay on the phone the entire time, guiding Ellie by having her count the ten steps down the stairs in the darkness. When instructed to go into the basement and check the circuit breaker, Ellie immediately tenses up and refuses. A few days later, however, Ellie calls her mother at work to let her know the house’s power went dead. Though she’s clearly traumatized by the incident, her parents brush it off as the cruel trick of a finicky old lock. After the family realizes a key hangs directly above the door frame, Ellie is quickly freed. Even with the voices of her parents reassuring her from the other side of the door, she begins to feel a presence slowly inching toward her up the pitch-black stairs. She frantically paws at the doorknob, which has locked solidly in place. Mere moments after stepping foot into their new home, Ellie cautiously peers into the basement, only to have the door shut behind her before the rest of her family can follow. Yet one room inspires abject dread as opposed to nostalgic mystique: The cellar. Her younger brother Steven (Dylan Fitzmaurice-Brady) approaches his new surroundings with predictable childlike curiosity, finding the old phonograph in the living room particularly intriguing. Their eldest daughter Ellie (Abby Fitz), conversely, thinks the house is an unparalleled eyesore, one that no amount of teen-appropriate room décor can even begin to alleviate. ![]() Mom (Elisha Cuthbert) and Dad (Eoin Macken) couldn’t be happier with their antiquated new abode, finding infinite charm in the worn-down floorboards and enormous reading room. The story begins where so many classic horror movies do: A family moves into a huge, historic house and creepiness immediately ensues. Aside from the one chilling scene grafted straight from The Ten Steps and its gorgeous, historic filming location, The Cellar just isn’t that deep. Incorporating a slew of plotlines-demons, Jewish folklore and a police investigation among them- The Cellar is erratic and unfocused, entirely unsure of the story it wishes to tell. Based off of his 2004 short film The Ten Steps, Muldowney’s latest expands the Satanic parameters of the movie’s plot, which unfortunately dulls much of the dread inherent in the original short. Irish director Brendan Muldowney’s The Cellar is an expansion of a project he completed nearly 20 years ago.
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