The Disappointments Room (2016)

Directed by: DJ Caruso | 89 minutes | drama, horror, thriller | Actors: Kate Beckinsale, Mel Raido, Duncain Joiner, Lucas Till, Michaela Conlin, Michael Landes, Marcia DeRousse, Celia Weston, Charles Carroll, Ella Jones, Gerald McRaney, Jennifer Leigh Mann, Joely Fisher

It’s a tried and true starting point for horror movies: family makes a fresh start after a traumatic event. In ‘The Disappointments Room’, David Barrow (Mel Raido) drags his wife Dana (Kate Beckinsale) and son Lucas (Duncan Joiner) to an old mansion to cope with daughter Catherine’s cot death. In the countryside, the family can escape the hectic city life, grow their own vegetables, shop at the farmers’ market… David can already picture it all. Dana doesn’t really want to turn her life upside down any further, but as an architect with the fixer-upper, at least she has enough to do.

Behind a cupboard, Dana finds a room that is not on the building plan. According to the lady of the local antiquarian bookshop, this is a so-called ‘disappointment room’, where distinguished families locked up deformed children to keep them out of sight from the outside world. Often these children led a sad life and died young from illness or suicide. When Dana has terrified visions of a disfigured girl and an old man, she sets out to investigate. What happened in the disappointment room and what does this mean for her own family? Meanwhile, David begins to wonder if his wife is still taking her pills.

The screenplay for ‘The Disappointments Room’ was written by director DJ Caruso (‘Disturbia’) and actor Wentworth Miller, better known to many as the cutie from “Prison Break”. With the disappointment room they deal with a phenomenon that few people know, but unfortunately Caruso and Miller choose the familiar path. The strongest element of the story, the tragedy of children living out their lives in solitude, never gets the attention it deserves. This makes ‘The Disappointments Room’ little more than a standard haunted house movie, which also never gets really scary.

It doesn’t go well with the characters either. David annoys as a happy jerk who forces his wife to do things she doesn’t want – which jerk throws a dinner party on his deceased daughter’s birthday? – and Dana is a shark bay who can be particularly sour. This makes it difficult to live with this family. Only with the handsome handyman Ben (Lucas Till) Dana seems to thaw a bit, but this storyline ends abruptly and therefore has little impact. The not very elegant denouement does not make matters any better. We can, of course, joke about ‘The Disappointments Room’ and disappointments, but we’ll leave them alone.