Going Down? Don’t Bother.
Brendan Muldowney’s The Cellar opens with the classic haunted-house setup: a family moves into a creepy old mansion that looks like it’s been waiting 200 years for its next set of victims. From the very first shot, you know this house has “Do Not Buy” energy—creaky floors, weird symbols, a basement darker than your browser history—but our protagonists march right in anyway, like they’ve never seen a horror movie before.
And thus begins one of the slowest descents into hell ever put on film—emotionally, narratively, and occasionally mathematically.
This isn’t a haunted house movie so much as a math-themed endurance test. You don’t watch The Cellar for scares; you watch it to see how many times you can hear someone count before losing your will to live.
The Setup: Counting Down to Disappointment
Elisha Cuthbert stars as Keira Woods, a mother who moves her family into an Irish mansion with her husband Brian (Eoin Macken), daughter Ellie (Abby Fitz), and son Steven (Dylan Fitzmaurice Brady). The house is enormous, ancient, and so obviously cursed that even Zillow would list it under “requires exorcism.”
Within minutes, the kids find a secret room filled with weird symbols, mysterious equations, and a record of some guy counting numbers like he’s auditioning for Sesame Street: Infernal Edition.
Later that night, Ellie goes into the cellar to flip the breaker after the power cuts out—because of course it does. Her mother stays on the phone, counting the steps with her: “One… two… three…” until Ellie’s voice changes into something that sounds like a demon who’s been chain-smoking souls for 400 years.
Cue static. Cue missing child. Cue endless parental angst and no real story momentum for the next 80 minutes.
The Mystery: Math Demons, Because Why Not
Keira spends the rest of the film investigating the house’s history, uncovering an evil presence named Leviathan who apparently exists somewhere between algebra and Satan.
Yes, The Cellar is the first horror movie to imply you can summon a demon through advanced geometry. If your high school math teacher ever felt soulless, now you know why.
The film leans hard into “scientific occultism,” which sounds cool until you realize it’s mostly people reading equations out loud in dim lighting. It’s less The Conjuring and more Mathlete Hellscape. Every time a new “symbol” is explained, the characters look amazed, while the audience desperately tries to stay awake.
At one point, Keira visits the elderly daughter of the home’s previous owner, who calmly explains that her dad accidentally opened a portal to another dimension while trying to save his dying son. Sure, lady. Happens to the best of us.
The Cast: Doing Their Best with Satan’s Spreadsheet
Elisha Cuthbert, bless her, gives this material more effort than it deserves. She’s earnest, committed, and clearly trying to act terrified of something that’s probably a tennis ball on a stick. But the script gives her nothing to work with except repeated phone calls, slow walking, and a facial expression best described as “I regret this mortgage.”
Eoin Macken plays the husband, Brian—a man so useless in a crisis that you wonder if he’s secretly working for the demon. His primary function is to dismiss Keira’s increasingly obvious supernatural findings with lines like, “You’re just stressed,” right before the walls start whispering in Aramaic.
The kids are fine, though Ellie gets the short end of the stick by disappearing early and spending most of the movie stuck in Hell doing long division.
The Horror: Not So Much Scary as Sleepy
If you like your horror subtle, atmospheric, and utterly devoid of payoff, The Cellar is your jam. The scares are so restrained they could be hiding under the bed, waiting for the courage to come out.
There are creaks. There are shadows. There’s the occasional demonic whisper that sounds like someone choking on alphabet soup. But there’s never any real sense of danger.
The titular cellar, which should be the movie’s MVP, feels more like an overhyped crawlspace. Every time someone descends the stairs, the tension flatlines. You find yourself rooting for the demon just to speed things along.
The monster, when it finally appears, looks like it wandered in from a 2003 Xbox cutscene—big, blurry, and allergic to good lighting. Its name is Baphomet, which sounds terrifying until you see it move like a man wearing too many Halloween costumes at once.
The Sound of Counting: Horror’s Newest Weapon (Against Patience)
Let’s talk about the counting. Because oh boy, does this movie love counting.
Characters count stairs. They count seconds. They count their remaining screen time. If numbers scare you, you might find this film horrifying. For everyone else, it’s like watching Rain Man have an anxiety attack in a haunted house.
The demonic counting is supposed to build tension—each number dragging us closer to some dark revelation. But after the fifteenth “…seventy-five… seventy-six…” you start wondering if the real curse is numerical repetition.
Pacing: A Marathon in Slow Motion
The Cellar moves with the urgency of a depressed tortoise. Scenes drag. Characters repeat information we already know. The middle act is so padded it could double as insulation for the actual house.
There’s a lot of wandering around with flashlights, a lot of “What was that sound?” and a criminal amount of exposition delivered by people staring at computer screens. You keep expecting something—anything—to happen, and then the credits roll instead.
Even the climax, where the family finally confronts the evil, feels like it’s happening underwater. The big “twist” (they’re trapped in Hell!) lands with all the impact of a wet sock.
The Ending: Trapped Forever in Mediocrity
By the time the finale rolls around, Keira’s in full mom-warrior mode. She’s chasing after her kids, facing down Baphomet, and shouting defiant monologues into the abyss. It should be epic, but it’s hard to take seriously when the “abyss” looks like a dimly lit hallway built out of leftover Halloween decorations.
The movie ends with the family realizing they’re still trapped in the demon’s dimension—counting numbers in unison like they’ve joined some sort of infernal math cult. It’s meant to be tragic. It’s mostly funny.
You half expect the credits to start counting too.
Technical Merits: Well-Lit Boredom
Visually, the film is decent—slickly shot, competently edited, and occasionally moody. The Irish countryside looks great, which only makes you wish the characters would step outside more.
The sound design does a lot of heavy lifting, layering whispers and drones that suggest tension the script never delivers. Unfortunately, all that atmospheric effort is wasted on a story that couldn’t frighten a calculator.
Final Grade: A Haunted House Movie That Should’ve Stayed Upstairs
The Cellar wants to be cosmic horror—a story about dimensions beyond comprehension, math as dark magic, and a mother’s desperate love. Instead, it’s a slow, confused slog that mistakes counting for suspense and confusion for depth.
It’s The Conjuring if everyone forgot to conjure anything. It’s The Babadook without the grief, or the book, or the babadook.
By the end, you’re not scared—you’re just grateful to be out of the basement.
Rating: 3 out of 10.
A lifeless horror film that takes you to Hell by way of algebra homework. The scariest thing about The Cellar is realizing you spent 90 minutes watching people count.
