The Cellar (2022)

I’ve recently watched The Cellar (2022) and decided to write a review. Warning: SPOILERS.

A family moves to a weird-looking house with suspicious symbols engraved everywhere. It doesn’t take long for things to get spooky and one of them disappear in the creepy cellar. Even spookier? The exact same thing happened to the family of the previous owner…

People really should start being more careful about suspiciously cheap houses. Especially when they look like that. Sure, it’s not as bad as the Crimson Peak manor, but it’s still obviously a place where weird shit happens. And that’s before Ellie and Steven find a strange recording on a gramophone that was hidden in a secret room. Oddly, their parents don’t seem to have a problem with that, nor do they explore the house in search for other secret rooms. However, that’s nothing compared to the sequence in which Keira insists that a terrified Ellie go into the cellar with only a flickering candle and her mobile phone for light to check the fuse box. Ellie counting the steps was spooky, though, even if the fact that she was going to count past 10 was predictable. But really, who does that? Sure, Keira didn’t know there was something down there, but her daughter could’ve easily fallen and broken her neck. So, Ellie is gone and no one can find her. This leads to some family drama as Keira finds out just how little she knows about her daughter, but it’s just not interesting. In fact, none of the characters are remotely interesting or original, and the scenes involving Keira and Brian’s work just felt unnecessary. Who cares if they’re planning a marketing campaign featuring fake vloggers and influencers and a competition named Natural Selection? What does that even have to do with whatever is going on in the spooky cellar? The police is pretty useless, too. All they do is tell Keira that there’s nothing else they can do, the scary drawings she found in the cellar are old and made with plant-based ink, and allude to the history of the house without actually explaining what happened.

Since the police isn’t doing anything, Keira starts her own investigation and does all the research she and Brian should’ve done before buying the house. So, the inscription above the door, ‘Solve et Coagula’, turns out to be an alchemist maxim, she finds Roman numerals and an equation carved on the cellar stairs (which is obviously the equation being recited in the gramophone recording), and the symbols carved above all the doors are Hebrew glyphs that when put together spell ‘Leviathan’, the Biblical sea monster, aka Serpent of the Abyss. Wait, they have a Biblical sea monster in the cellar? Keira also googles the previous owner of the house, a physicist named John Fetherston, whose portrait is still hanging in the hall, and finds out he and his family, except his daughter, just disappeared one day. Again, how is it possible that no one had thought to do this until now even if only out of curiosity? As the house’s secrets start being revealed, the supernatural phenomena increase. So, we get cellar wind, a weird eye looking through the keyhole, and Keira temporarily locked in the cellar while something comes up from the bottom of the much longer stairs. This isn’t enough for Brian, though, who remains sceptic. Keira takes the equation to a mathematician, Dr Fournet, who became a genius after an accident activated certain parts of his brain. I don’t get why the movie decided to give this minor character such an elaborate backstory. Anyway, he explains that Fetherston used to work with Schrödinger, which leads to Keira declaring that Ellie is like the famous cat - neither alive nor dead until she finds her, or something. He also tells her that the equation is for opening a door to another dimension, which is more than enough. Really, there was no need for all that clunky dialogue trying to connect the movie’s ideas to an already existing theory. A different dimension isn’t a concept difficult to understand by people watching a supernatural horror movie. After their meeting, Fournet calls Keira to tell her that the equation was used by alchemists in the XII century, and that there was a similar house in Belgium whose residents also disappeared without a trace. Well, that can’t be good… which is why Keira makes no attempt to get her son out of their creepy house while she keeps investigating. Another important detail from that conversation is that Fournet called Keira’s old phone and heard someone counting. Brian refuses to accept Keira’s theories, even as she explains that the house is named XAOS, the Greek word for ‘Chaos’, which means the void that existed before Order. I’m not sure equating this void with Leviathan’s abyss makes sense, but that won’t matter in the end. In addition to not believing her, Brian tries to smash the equation carved on the steps with a really big hammer, but all that does is trigger more supernatural events. This time, Steven sees Ellie in the secret room, where they find her phone.

The next logical step, which frankly should’ve been one of the first, is for Keira to go talk to Fetherston’s daughter, Rose, who’s in a religious nursing home. She confirms that it’s Leviathan, one of the seven Princes of Hell in the cellar, and adds a disturbing new detail: it’s not just the cellar that’s the problem - it’s the whole house! To make matters worse, Keira calls Fournet and hears him counting, too. Oh, crap, it’s a counting epidemic! No, really, why is this ancient chaotic entity making everyone count? Oho, but it turns out our supernatural numbers lover isn’t Leviathan. At least that’s what Brian found out after he reordered the glyphs and the accompanying triangles and ended up with the sigil of Baphomet. He also found an image of Baphomet with ‘Solve and Coagula’ written on its arms that somehow never turned up in Keira’s previous online research. So it’s Baphomet in the cellar. Well, that’s better than a Biblical sea monster. In addition to allegedly having been worshipped by the Knights Templar and witches, he’s said to be very, very ancient. At least here; in real life, that androgynous goat drawing was made in the XIX century and has nothing to do with the Templar’s ‘Baphomet’. It was also not supposed to be malignant, but unfortunately, due to unfair prejudices against goats, it ended up being conflated with Satan and the Christian Hell. Despite everything they’ve witnessed and been told so far, instead of getting the fuck out of there, Keira decides to turn on the gramophone. This results in Steven disappearing from the cellar and reappearing in the secret room, feverish, and with Baphomet’s sigil on his chest. He also says he rode the Beast with 7 heads and 10 horns. Wait, so in addition to Baphomet, there’s also the Beast from the sea? That cellar is pretty crowded… Which is probably why the mystical goat decided to finally get out of there and spook Keira. Fortunately, there’s no wall crawling. Unfortunately, Brian isn’t going to help because he ended up in a trance and is too busy counting. Keira manages to evade Baphomet and then follows it back into the cellar, which is of course much bigger than normal. There, she finds this never-ending plain, where people appear to be doomed to walk and count steps for all eternity. She spots Ellie and takes her back to the house, where she gets Brian and Steven to snap out of it and follow her out of there. Except, there’s no ‘out of there’ because like Rose said, the house is part of it, too, and they’re now stuck in the Baphomet dimension for all eternity. That explains why it let Keira go, but not why she wasn’t affected by the counting thing. If Baphomet had an inkling of personality, I could believe it was all just a cruel game, but the only thing the movie gives the audience is the usual generic talk about an ancient evil. The mention of one of the Biblical Beasts was incredibly random after Leviathan turned out to be a misdirection, and didn’t match what we saw of the other dimension. It’s like the filmmakers realized they had forgotten to write their mythical monster beyond some Wikipedia-like summary and decided to latch onto something more famous just like they did with Schrödinger’s Cat.

VERDICT

The Cellar (2022) has some spooky moments and images, but the characters are empty vessels, including Baphomet, and I just can’t get over the muddled mythology + all the counting. Abyzou is going around eating children, Pazuzu is possessing people and traumatizing them, Asmodeus wants to infiltrate the Vatican and release the Fallen Angels, and Baphomet is… making people count steps in a parallel dimension? Seriously? Also, why is the counting spreading like a virus? This movie could’ve been so much better if the people behind this had come up with something worthier of an ancient chaotic evil with its own realm; or at least had given the audience a good reason for Baphomet’s preferred torture method.

By Danforth