The Cellar

 I really enjoyed The Pilgrimage, a historical VOD action movie where Jon Bernthal gets medieval while protecting a few monks and a relic of (perceived) mass destruction. So of course I'm going to watch a movie from the same writer/director (Brendan Muldowney) about, going by the trailer, a haunted house with demonic equations, alchemy and a passage to some sort of Sheol.

 The good news is that Muldowney remains pretty good behind the cameras, and cinematographer Tom Comerford returns as well: it's a nicely atmospheric movie, with some beautiful panoramic shots of the Irish countryside and some well-constructed (if generic) genre moments.

 The bad news is that it's kind of a mess, and not the fun kind of mess.

 Keira Woods (Elisha Cuthbert) has just moved to a huge new house with her husband (Eoin Macken) and her two children - a nasty, deeply unlikeable teen (Abby Fitz), and a weirdo tween (Dylan Fitzmaurice Brady). The elder Woods-es run an ad agency using influencers or something, and if there's a combination of words that would make me lose sympathy with anyone... well, that'd be high up in the list. Especially when they talk about the specifics of the campaign. That shit is more horrific than anything in the movie.

 Anyhow! Ellie, the teen, is basically in complete, unlikable stroppy little turd mode from the first moment we see her; So when the cellar of the house devours her and she goes missing, I half-expected the family to shrug, cut their losses and carry on as usual.

 But no - Keira goes on the warpath instead, and when the police can't turn up any clues and assume instead her daughter ran away, she starts investigating on her own. She finds that the stairs her daughter went missing on has numbered steps and a formula inscribed at the bottom, and Judaic characters inscribed on random places around the house.

 There's also the words Solve Coagula, which, along with a picture of someone posing with his two fingers facing up (but not the other two facing down, which kind of defeats the occult purpose) are a very clear reference to a famous alchemical image - it might be a slight spoiler as to the nature of the menace hiding somewhere in the house.

 Everything points to the occult, as Keira confirms when she consults with a math professor (Aaron Monaghan) and discovers the previous owner of the house was an alchemist as well as a mathematician. Incidentally, the math teacher she talks to used to be a normal lunkhead until he hit his head a couple years prior and kablam! instant math prodigy. I... yeah, I have no idea what they were thinking. It's played completely straight. That whole character introduction is bewildering.

 All of the answers, when they come, are deeply half-arsed and underwhelming; The film plays with some interesting ideas but fails to do any of them justice. It's not entirely witless - I do like the concept of someone walking down some stairs further than there are steps, for example. Which, incidentally, was the basis for the original short that got expanded into this movie.
 Oh, and I've been remiss on reporting possessed toys in haunted house movies lately (there was a slinky in Shock, I think, as well as a swing used as the means to a curse). It doesn't begin to make up for my lapse, but here we get that old staple of a ball falling down a set of stairs, and a haunted abacus. That one might be new.

 The acting is a little iffy, but I can't really fault the actors for failing to breathe life into these characters. As mentioned earlier, at least the technical side of things is well handled; It's a good-looking low-budget film. Things also do at least get a little nuts towards the end. I don't want to raise anyone's expectations - It's a clear case of too little, too late. The puzzle-solving aspect should have been the film's strongest draw, but unfortunately the script is in no way able to deliver answers worthy of the questions asked or the subjects raised.