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What it's about:
Dana and David move from Brooklyn to a once-grand southern mansion, along with their five-year-old son, looking for a fresh start. But, Dana’s discovery of a secret room unleashes unexplainable events that test her sanity and slowly reveal the home’s terrifying past.
What we thought:
Along with Collide, The Disappointments Room is another casualty of Relativity Media’s bankruptcy, and this horror is just another one of the company’s long list of mediocre films. It tried to be more than just a ‘haunted house’ cliché by adding an unreliable and emotionally unstable main character, and instead of making the audience wonder if what she’s seeing is real or not, it instead makes them wonder how did they end up watching this in the first place.
A family shaken by tragedy moves into a new house in the middle of nowhere (of course) to start a new life, but are haunted by the secrets of the house’s shameful past, as well as their own.
Though I love Kate Beckinsale, especially if she’s kicking ass in a British accent, she does tend to end up in some bad films. Her performance is never the worst thing though, and her spectacular dinner party meltdown was an awesome scene that could’ve stood alone as a short film. The script and boring jump scares is what dragged the film down, and it never really had any remarkable twists in the ghost tale section. The main focus was on the mental stability of the mother, and why they had to move to the house, but this never really hooks the audience.
Written by Prison Break star Wentworth Miller, the story is based on some truth – disappointment rooms were a real thing that were around in the 20th century. They were used to lock away disabled relatives that were seen as a disgrace to their families. This could have been a very interesting topic that wasn’t adequately explored in the movie, which could have been used as a parable for Beckinsale’s character’s own mental issues and the family ‘trying to hide away’ from their problems. But to its credit, The Disappointments Room wasn’t trying to aim for the stars, just maybe the clouds.
When a movie breaks the record for most US cinemas to drop it after the third week of its release, then you know it’s a movie you should probably skip. Lacklustre and pretty average, The Disappointments Room disappoints where there wasn’t really any expectations to begin with. Beckinsale is still a queen though.
