Welcome to the Door That Should’ve Stayed Closed
There are films that redefine horror and those that make you want to redefine your life choices. The Other Side of the Door (2016) proudly belongs in the latter category—a supernatural film so relentlessly mediocre it makes opening an ancient cursed gateway to the underworld sound like a vacation.
Directed by Johannes Roberts (of 47 Meters Down “fame”), this Anglo-Indian co-production promises exotic mysticism, deep grief, and jump scares. What it delivers is 90 minutes of clichés, bad decisions, and Sarah Wayne Callies looking like she wishes she’d stayed on The Walking Dead.
This is a movie that takes place in India but somehow has less authenticity than a Taco Bell samosa.
The Premise: Ghost Parenting for Dummies
Maria Harwood (Sarah Wayne Callies) is an expat living in India with her husband Michael (Jeremy Sisto, looking perpetually confused) and their two kids. When her son Oliver dies in a car accident, Maria spirals into depression, guilt, and really questionable decision-making. Her housekeeper Piki (Suchitra Pillai), who is basically the only person in the film with common sense, tells her about a temple where the living can speak to the dead—under one very specific condition:
Don’t open the door.
So naturally, Maria opens the door.
That’s it. That’s the whole movie. A grieving mother ignores supernatural instructions, unleashes a curse, and spends the rest of the film being haunted by her dead son, who’s now an undead brat with a flair for jump scares.
Sarah Wayne Callies: Professional Mourner
Let’s give credit where it’s due—Sarah Wayne Callies tries. She really does. Her performance oscillates between genuine anguish and soap opera-level overacting, as if she’s auditioning for The Exorcist: Lifetime Edition.
Unfortunately, no amount of acting can save dialogue like, “Oliver, Mommy loves you, but you have to stop killing the dog.” Callies spends most of the runtime wide-eyed and sweaty, alternately sobbing and whispering “Oliver?” into empty rooms. It’s a one-woman emotional treadmill that goes nowhere.
Jeremy Sisto, meanwhile, exists purely to doubt his wife and get stabbed. It’s a role that requires neither emotional range nor logic—he’s basically the film’s designated skeptic-slash-pincushion.
The Door: An Architectural Disaster
The titular “door” is the film’s big metaphorical device—a mystical barrier between life and death, a symbol of grief and consequence. It’s also a literal door, which Maria stares at for a full minute before breaking the only rule she was given.
You can practically hear the spirits of better horror writers groaning.
There’s an entire sequence where Maria hears her dead son’s voice begging her to open it, and instead of saying, “Nice try, Satan,” she flings it open like she’s late for brunch. If your movie hinges on a character doing the dumbest thing imaginable, you’d better make it worth it. The Other Side of the Door doesn’t.
Oliver: The Ghost Who Won’t Go to His Room
Ah, Oliver. Cute when alive, creepy when dead, annoying in both states. The kid’s spirit returns from beyond the grave to haunt the family in the least imaginative ways possible: self-playing piano, moving chairs, ominous whispers, and strategically timed power outages.
He’s supposed to represent maternal guilt, but mostly he represents the reason horror movie parents should invest in better locks and less sentimental attachment.
By the time the kid bites his sister and starts acting like Chucky’s pen pal, you stop feeling sympathy and start rooting for the afterlife’s HR department to intervene.
Cultural Confusion and Cheap Mysticism
For a film set in India, The Other Side of the Door seems terrified of actually engaging with India beyond the “spooky exotic” aesthetic. The Aghoris—real-life ascetics who deal with death as a form of spiritual transcendence—are reduced to generic cult extras with bad hygiene and worse dialogue.
The film uses Indian spirituality the same way tourists use local markets: buy the weirdest-looking thing and hope it feels authentic.
Johannes Roberts tries to give the movie a “cross-cultural flavor,” but it feels more like a haunted episode of Eat Pray Love. Every Hindu reference is treated like a plot device, every temple like a discount Raiders of the Lost Ark set piece.
Jump Scares: Predictable and Pointless
You know that feeling when you walk into a haunted house attraction, and a teenager in a rubber mask jumps out every five seconds? That’s this movie’s editing strategy.
The jump scares arrive like clockwork, telegraphed by sudden silences and orchestral blasts so loud they could wake Oliver again. Roberts mistakes loud for scary—his idea of suspense is turning the volume knob to “ear trauma.”
There’s not a single scare in this film that isn’t visible from a mile away. You’ll start counting beats between quiet moments and loud ones, like a drinking game for the genre-impaired.
The Aghoris and Mrtyu: Death by Explanation
When the plot finally starts unraveling, Piki shows up to deliver an entire TED Talk about how Maria’s actions doomed her son’s soul and broke the laws of the universe. Then we meet Mrtyu, the gatekeeper of the underworld, played by Javier Botet—Hollywood’s favorite tall, bendy monster guy.
Botet’s performance would be impressive if we could see it for more than 0.7 seconds at a time. Instead, the camera shakes like it’s being operated by someone allergic to stability.
The exposition gets so dense it feels like reading the instruction manual to your own haunting. By the time the Aghoris invade the Harwood home chanting Sanskrit like it’s a remix, the movie has lost all sense of coherence.
The Climax: Everyone Dies, Nobody Cares
The final act goes full chaos mode. Lucy gets possessed, the family dog gets murdered (a cinematic crime punishable by eternal shame), the father gets stabbed, and Maria sacrifices herself to stop her zombie kid from ruining everyone’s day.
In theory, this should be tragic. In practice, it’s just exhausting.
The big emotional twist—Michael repeating Maria’s mistake by trying to bring her back—is meant to be poetic. Instead, it’s the narrative equivalent of someone repeatedly touching a hot stove and acting surprised it burns.
Direction and Atmosphere: Colonial Gloom
Visually, the film looks like a travel brochure for Haunted India. The cinematography leans heavily on dust, shadows, and flickering candles. There’s a permanent sepia filter over everything, as if the movie itself is dying of jaundice.
Johannes Roberts clearly wanted to make something moody and grief-driven like The Others or The Orphanage, but ended up with The Mother Who Couldn’t Follow Instructions. The pacing is uneven, the scares repetitive, and the emotional beats overwritten.
Themes: Guilt, Grief, and Gross Oversimplification
At its core, The Other Side of the Door tries to explore maternal guilt and the pain of letting go. Unfortunately, it handles those themes with all the nuance of a sledgehammer. The message seems to be: “Mothers ruin everything when they love too much.”
It’s the kind of emotional manipulation that mistakes tragedy for depth. Instead of catharsis, we get melodrama—and instead of horror, we get a sad Hallmark movie with corpses.
Final Thoughts: Please, Don’t Open This Movie
The Other Side of the Door isn’t the worst horror film ever made, but it might be the most boring séance you’ll ever attend. It’s predictable, loud, and emotionally hollow—a film that confuses misery with meaning and ghosts with screenwriting shortcuts.
By the time the credits roll, you won’t feel scared—you’ll feel spiritually jet-lagged.
Verdict: 1 Cursed Door Out of 5
Mood: Colonial Guilt with a Side of Jump Scares
Best Watched With: Earplugs, patience, and a sturdy lock on your own front door.
