Tag: review

I am not very enthralled with “The Disappointment’s Room” .  I started to nod off to sleep once and I found myself checking my e-mail when a major denouement occurred.  Nonetheless, it’s an okay film to which I give a C+ (slightly above average).

It’s  a typical, low-key haunted house plot.  A family consisting of a mother, father, and small son moves from the big city (Brooklyn) to an old mansion in the country (in this case North Carolina) outside  a very small town of quaint characters where everyone knows each other.  The mother finds out that their house is haunted by the spirits of a nineteenth-century family, ruled by a stern father, who kept their deformed daughter locked in a room upstairs.  However, the mother’s perception is in question, as she is recovering from her own bout of mental illness and depression, somehow rooted in the death of the couple’s daughter (I won’t give away any more).

The ad I saw billed this as “drama/thriller”, and I would say that is a decent summary, except I would add this is about 60% drama and 40% thriller.  This movie would have been better if the director (D.J. Caruso:  Disturbia, Eagle Eye, Taking Lives) had focused more on the thriller aspect.  The psychological aspect of the mother’s problems isn’t sufficiently explored to be terribly interesting…nor is the story behind the ghosts.

The suspense (though not intense) is fairly continuous as the story progresses, but no real shocking revelations in terms of twists or the unexpected take place.  Still, the story is put together better than some and I didn’t notice any obvious loose ends.  Luck did play a major part in resolving the plot, which I always take as lazy writing.   The whole film seems to be made out of stock characters and bits of stock plots lazily interwoven to make a few bucks without really advancing the genre or taking the effort to create anything new or to explore the deeper aspects of the characters.

I recommend seeing this movie at a matinee, if you have nothing better to do and if you have a few bucks burning a hole in your pocket.