The Disappointments Room

Year: 2016
Genre: Horror
Directed: D.J. Caruso
Stars: Kate Beckinsale, Lucas Till, Gerald McRaney, Mel Raido, Duncan Joiner, Michael Landes, Ella Jones, Jennifer Leigh Mann, Chris Matheny, Michaela Conlin, Charles Carroll, Marcia DeRousse
Production: Relativity Media

The Disappointments Room is a disappoi...

See what I did there? I delivered the exact line you expected only I half-a**ed it. That in a nutshell is The Disappointments Room; it sets itself up to deliver nothing but the bare minimum and then doesn't even deliver on that. I automatically assumed this film was less than a blip on the radar. A small budget, small minded, small expectation snoozefest comparable to this year's The Other Side of the Door (2016). So imagine my surprise when the credits revealed the movie was directed by D.J. Caruso, the same guy who made Disturbia (2007). What the hell man? What the actual hell?

Bro...come on!

The plot, for what it's worth, concerns itself with a small family of New Yorkers who have moved to the American South to renovate an old antebellum mansion. While touring the grounds Dana (Beckinsale) our intrepid architect, notices a part of the house that's not in the actual blueprints. She prods further, locating the key to the room and deciding what the hay; let's open it up. What she doesn't know is the room also hides secrets that may anger the mansion's ghostly inhabitants and test the limits of her sanity.

The film strains mightily to fit every basic haunted house cliche. They include but are not limited to: ghosts standing behind their victims, toys magically appearing, elaborate apparition flashback mode and pets prematurely meeting their demise. Those cliches are then complimented with the sloppiest of editing and laziest of jump scares providing a movie completely lacking atmosphere. What's worse is this faded out dollhouse of a movie comes complete with a boring assemblage of shallow traits and neuroses masquerading as characters, which are thrown about with little regard for perspective, personality or motivation.

I see ghosts! Clearly, I should be medicated.

The most laughable of these paltry characters is Kate Beckinsale as Dana, whose lip-quivering mother in emotional recovery rings egregiously false. She saunters through scenes looking perturbed and has her share of bad dreams which is to be expected. Yet when the film reveals possible psychosis and carelessly lumbers towards a splashy confrontation, it's clear Beckinsale is drowning in a cesspool of offensively bad schizophrenia tropes.

This movie was not fun to watch...no surprise there. But it's also no fun to review. There's nothing resembling the ponderous hubris of Warner Bros's DCEU or the desperate "love me, please" attitude of Independence Day: Resurgence (2016). There's no hilariously bad reasoning like in God's Not Dead 2 (2016) or drive-by bellicose like in 13 Hours (2016). The Disappointments Room is the movie equivalent of flat skunk beer. Any processes that were once teaming with life are now dead and baking in the sun, making your patio smell like cat piss.

Nothing happens in this film. There are no consequences to sift through, no conclusions to be drawn, no lessons to be learned. If the opposite of love isn't hate but indifference, than the fact that I left this movie feeling nothing should be a testament to just how bad this thing is.

Final Grade: F