The Disappointments Room (2016)

For me the movie seems to suffer mostly from it trying to be two things without being really good at being one thing.

I went into the movie expecting a ghost story. What I ended up seeing is this some sort of psychological thriller staring Kate Beckinsale. She plays a architect who moves into a new house in the country with her family in order to get over the lost of a child, when she discovers a previous owner also lost their child on the same day and are hunting the room that they kept this child, who was a deformed girl born to a well to do family that wanted to keep their shame under wraps.

Kate Beckinsale does a really good job at playing a woman distressed over loosing a child. Most movies don't usually show this part of the break down, as her character develops a drinking habit, starts looking at her husband differently, to the point that a new man has a chance to interfere with the relationship, and she's becoming distance from the child she still has, in most movies this happens before that family moves into the house, but hear it actual seems to be happening during.

What takes away from this performance is the uneven dual plots with the ghost of their new home hunting Beckinsale's character, driving her crazy by putting ideas into her head about her feelings towards her dead child.

Having two movies in one can sometimes work (Like it did in From Dust Still Dawn), but here I feel the filmmakers never were quite sure about what they wanted the movie to be, which really effected it poorly.

Fmovies: I had high hopes for the first half of this movie, but it just falls into a jumble in the last half. So many unanswered questions; a random kite, a random carpenter,etc..

If you want to see a classic with a similar story line, but done much, much better, check out The Changeling, bone chilling Canadian movie from 1980 with George C Scott. Don't be fooled by it's age, it's scary. You can even see it on youtube for free: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVttK509_JI .....it's basically everything this movie is trying to be except....you know, it makes sense.

Saw the movie today. I enjoyed watching Kate Beckinsale and I believe she made her character believable, you feel what the character is going through. However, this was supposed to be a HORROR, not a drama on Lifetime Movie Network. Some revelations are made before the middle of the movie and the pace just slowed and there were no more surprises or plot development. You know that part of a horror movie where the evildoing of the antagonist, the fighting back of the protagonist create a crescendo of visceral emotions in the viewer leading to a catharsis and release, that never happens. There were more than a couple of jump-scares but the possibilities from the plot and the characters just were not followed through and explored enough for the horror to happen for me. Nice story though and definitely worth a watch if you like scary TV dramas.

The Disappointments Room fmovies. The Disappointments Room.

Do you know where that room is? It was my living room while watching this horrible excuse of a movie.

What the heck was the movie about at all?

And I knew it before. As you probably are just as big horror fans as I am, you know the golden rule: when there is a famous Hollywood actor / actress in it, the movie is bad. Really, really bad.

But I adore Kate Beckinsale (even though blonde is NOT a good hair colour for her...), so I wanted to give it a shot. And hey, there CAN be pleasant surprises when it comes to horror flicks with stars in it. Deliver Us From Evil, Mirrors, The Veil (but not for Alba, for T.Jane only!). It CAN work, so I was full of hope.

I shouldn't have been.

The movie is completely boring, from start to end. There is no "horror" in it. I mean, literally. The only scenes, that are supposed to be creepy, are flashbacks, nothing more. No jumpscares, no gore, no suspense, just plain nothing.

If Kate at least would have undressed, but nooooo, not even that.

The plot is confusing and has no start and no end - I heard important scenes got cut out of the movie (read the review of the extra from the movie's set), but even with all of them included it would still be a horrible movie.

Kate Beckinsale obviously did not receive enough money to bring in some effort, and the Frank Grillo clone could not catch that up for her.

The quality of course was good, perfect camera, light, sound, there was nothing left to be desired. But you can bet Kate Beckinsale does not work with people not knowing their technical jobs on set.

This must have been some contract work for Beckinsale, I cannot see why she participated in this mess of a movie. Or maybe she cannot get any more roles these days, since the success of "Underworld" lies far back in the past, and she does not get younger, I don't know. Whatever, just like me, she should have avoided this movie.

I could not even tell, what the movie really, really was about. Sure, there was this room where the rich people hid their ugly kids, fair enough. But why some - what? Ghosts? - haunt her now, and ONLY her but nobody else, I have no idea. What was it about that dude helping doing the repairs? Is he dead, or what? Was he real at all? He has to be, since her hubbie has seen him, right? And all those multiple scenes, where you see all actors in different roles? WTF?

As the title says: the movie is a complete and utter mess. It has no clear target to achieve, no character development at all, and more holes than plot.

The golden rule just got confirmed again. Avoid horror movies with big names in it. Give 20.000 bucks to some talented amateurs, and you will get way more entertaining horror flicks.

Put Beckinsale back in this black leather catsuit or let her play some RomCom, this is her only range as actress.

Please.

No More.

The Disappointments Room is a disappoi...

See what I did there? I delivered the exact line you expected only I half-a**ed it. That in a nutshell is The Disappointments Room; it sets itself up to deliver nothing but the bare minimum and then doesn't even deliver on that. I automatically assumed this film was less than a blip on the radar. A small budget, small minded, small expectation snoozefest comparable to this year's The Other Side of the Door (2016). So imagine my surprise when the credits revealed the movie was directed by D.J. Caruso, the same guy who made Disturbia (2007). What the heck man? What the actual heck?

The plot, for what it's worth, concerns itself with a small family of New Yorkers who have moved to the American South to renovate an old antebellum mansion. While touring the grounds Dana (Beckinsale) our intrepid architect, notices a part of the house that's not in the actual blueprints. She prods further, locating the key to the room and deciding what the hay; let's open it up. What she doesn't know is the room also hides secrets that may anger the mansion's ghostly inhabitants and test the limits of her sanity.

The film strains mightily to fit every basic haunted house cliché. They include but are not limited to: ghosts standing behind their victims, toys magically appearing, elaborate apparition flashback mode and pets prematurely meeting their demise. Those clichés are then complimented with the sloppiest of editing and laziest of jump scares providing a movie completely lacking atmosphere. What's worse is this faded out dollhouse of a movie comes complete with a boring assemblage of shallow traits and neuroses masquerading as characters, which are thrown about with little regard for perspective, personality or motivation.

The most laughable of these paltry characters is Kate Beckinsale as Dana, whose lip-quivering mother in emotional recovery rings egregiously false. She saunters through scenes looking perturbed and has her share of bad dreams which is to be expected. Yet when the film reveals possible psychosis and carelessly lumbers towards a splashy confrontation, it's clear Beckinsale is drowning in a cesspool of offensively bad schizophrenia tropes.

This movie was not fun to watch...no surprise there. But it's also no fun to review. There's nothing resembling the ponderous hubris of Warner Bros's DCEU or the desperate "love me, please" attitude of Independence Day: Resurgence (2016). There's no hilariously bad reasoning like in God's Not Dead 2 (2016) or drive-by bellicose like in 13 Hours (2016). The Disappointments Room is the movie equivalent of flat skunk beer. Any processes that were once teaming with life are now dead and baking in the sun, making your patio smell like cat p***.

Nothing happens in this film. There are no consequences to sift through, no conclusions to be drawn, no lessons to be learned. If the opposite of love isn't hate but indifference, than the fact that I left this movie feeling nothing should be a testament to just how bad this thing is.

Long shelved (filmed in 2014, unreleased until 2016) this cannot decide if it wants to be a haunted house flick, a psychological thriller, family drama, or a routine slasher movie, as a couple, still reeling from the death of their infant daughter, relocate, with their young son, to a remote mansion, for unexplained reasons.

Weird things begin happening immediately, but the film implies it may all be in wifey's mind. The discovery of a hidden room, and a black dog prowling the grounds takes the plot into generic possession/ haunting territory, but dead daughter subplot takes it into tragedy/ family drama territory. We are introduced to who I believe was intended to be the token psychic woman, who disappeared as quickly as she appeared, which lead me to wonder why she was even there. Twice the film tried to bring a third party/ love interest into the plot, before dropping one completely, and killing the other, without anything further being mentioned about him.

This entire film is like that, with seemingly only the beginning of its plot threads being explored, then dropped entirely. The film never climaxes, so much as it just stops, with nothing remotely close to closure to any of its numerous plot threads.

Well acted, and there is enough atmosphere in the Gothic home, but whole chunks of the plot seem to have been edited out prior to release, giving the film an unsatisfactory, unfinished feel.