- Directed by Brendan Muldowney
- Written by Brendan Muldowney
- Stars Elisha Cuthbert, Eoin Macken, Dylan Fitzmaurice Brady
- Run Time: 1 hour, 34 Minutes
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
This movie is when bad things happen to beautiful homes and happy families. It’s creepy, well acted, and has good effects. It builds nicely, gradually filling in what’s going on. All in all a thumbs up.
Synopsis
Keira and her family are moving into a huge old home. Daughter Ellie says it’s gross and creepy. Ellie acts like a jerk, because that’s what moody teenagers do in movies. They all go down into the filthy cellar, and Ellie gets locked in by accident. She hears something down there and panics. By the time they use the key to open the door, she’s screaming and banging. She does not want to stay in this old dump. She’s one of those teens that hates literally everything.
Parents Keira and Brian have a work meeting that night, so they leave Ellie and Stevie alone in the big house. Her boyfriend calls, and she talks about going to live with him. Steven finds an old cow skull in his playroom. Steven says his friend told him the house was owned by a witch who made a pact with the devil. Ellie plays a record that seems to be just a man reciting math.
Then the power goes out. Ellie calls Keira, who tells her to go into the basement and check the breaker. She goes down there, carrying a candle. She’s obviously terrified, but goes down anyway. There’s more steps than there should bem which freaks out Kiera.
They rush home, go downstairs, but Ellie is nowhere to be found. They call the police, but Ellie has run off before, so they think she’ll turn up at a friend’s house in a few days. There’s a search party in the woods the next morning, but still nothing. They start putting up “Missing Persons” signs in the area.
Keira still doesn’t think she ran away. “Something happened in the cellar.” She searches the cellar with a UV light. She finds math symbols inscribed in the floor and walls– and many skeletal faces painted there as well. The police check it out and say that the skulls are just painted on the walls.
Keira notices that there are strange symbols above each of the doors in the house. The letters are Hebrew and spell “Leviathan.” She looks up Leviathan and sees pictures of a big dragon-like sea monster. She plays the math record, and at the same time, little Stevie starts reciting the numbers as well– as he walks into a secret door. She stops when she hears him counting numbers.
She goes into the basement, and the door gets stuck for her as well. They really need to get that thing fixed! She hears something growling down there as Stevie fights to get the door open from the other side. The ominous music intensifies until Brian comes and opens the door. Everyone is fine. She insists that she heard something, but Brian thinks she’s starting to go crazy. Kiera tells him that the family who used to live here all disappeared too.
Keira goes to see a math professor to show him the formula from the cellar floor. It seems to represent something having to do with multiple dimensions. He also explains that old man Featherston, who used to own that house, was also a math professor. Fatherston and the rest of the family did vanish, but his daughter survived.
Keira does more research and starts telling all this to Brian, who is more and more convinced that Keira is obsessed with nonsense. He goes downstairs to break up the inscriptions. He can’t do it, and then the record player starts on its own and then Stevie sees something appears in the secret room that looks like the rotted corpse of Ellie but it vanishes. They find Ellie’s phone in there. Brian’s a believer after that.
Keira tracks down the last Fetherson woman in a nursing home. She tells Keira that Leviathan is one of the seven princes of Hell. Her father brought it into the world with his mathematics. “It’s not just the cellar, it’s the whole house!” she says.
Brian meanwhile, has been doing his own research and tells Keira that the symbols indicate that Baphomet, a demon, is involved. The whole house has been designed around his influence. They play the record again, on purpose. Stevie sees Baphomet in the basement and all Hell breaks loose in the house.
They find Stevie, but he’s clearly not himself. Neither is Brian. They both start counting down to zero, and then “It’s here.” Something wants through the cellar door. Keira hides and watches as something with horns and goat legs starts clomping around the house. Then she sees the rest of it and runs into the basement to rescue Ellie. The stairs now go way, way down and there are tunnels.
She eventually enters Hell itself, or maybe the outskirts anyway, which is made up of vast numbers of dirty gray people shuffling in the same direction counting. Keira far-too-easily finds Ellie and grabs her, but Ellie is a zombie now. The two go back up the stairs with the demon following all the way.
Once upstairs, Ellie wakes up. All four of the family try to head outside to their car, but the door out now opens to the down stairway. Brian, Ellie, and Stevie all start counting and walking away. This time, Keira joins them.
Commentary
It’s pretty good. There’s just one mystery after another, and the creepy factor is turned way up on this one. It’s not exactly a haunted house. It’s more like Amityville Horror; a demon-infested home.
The acting was decent, the sets were well-done, what we saw of the creature looked good. There was a bit of pseudo-scientific babble about Schroedinger’s Box and mathematics of other dimensions that try to make things make sense. The simple explanation about why this all happened is that old Mr. Fetherston released something while trying to save his ailing son, by using math to solve and invoke magic. I guess that’s a good enough reason. It works well enough here.