Disappointments Room (2016 film)
The Disappointments Room (2016 film)
Summary
"Some mysteries should not be unlocked." A mother and her young son release unimaginable horrors from the attic of their rural dream home.
Details
- Release Date: 2016
- Country/Language: USA, English
- Genres/Technical: Drama, Mystery, Horror (Gothic horror), Thriller
- Setting: Modern (could as easily have been Classic or Gaslight), North Carolina, USA
- Runtime: 1 hr 25 min
- Starring: Kate Beckinsale, Mel Raido, Duncan Joiner
- Director: D.J. Caruso
- Writer: Wentworth Miller, D.J. Caruso
- Producer/Production Co: Demarest Films, Media Talent Group, Relativity Media
- View Trailer: (link)
- TVTropes: (link)
- IMDB Page: (link)
Ratings
MPAA Ratings
- Rated: R (Violence, Profanity, Adult Content)
Tentacle Ratings
A rough measure of how "Lovecraftian" the work is:
- S____ (One Tentacle: Debateably Lovecraftian; has almost no direct connection to Lovecraft's work)
The old Gothic horror "trope" of a hidden room in the attic or basement of a house where the family "disappointments" and other horrors are locked away is one that Lovecraft dabbled in more than once, but this film was not a particularly Lovecraftian approach to the idea.
Note: This rating is not intended as a measure of quality, merely of how closely related to Lovecraftian "Weird" fiction the work is.
Reviews
Review Links:
- Y.Whateley - "Last night I saw The Disappointments Room (2016), which I was kind of looking forward to; unfortunately it lived up to its name, and was a bit of a let-down for me - maybe I'm being too hard on it: I can actually think of a handful of ways to turn it into a CoC RPG scenario, and I can see what they were aiming for with it - a fairly conventional Gothic ghost story told through unconventional, post-modern story-telling means - but the result just didn't really ring true or gel with me...."
- Ryne Barber at (The Moon is a Dead World) - (4.5/10) "...The biggest problem, though, is that The Disappointments Room doesn't have much to say about mental illness at all, and more than that, the actual disappointments room has nothing to do with [the main character or her son]. [Director] Caruso treats mental illness like a catch-all for crazy things that happen, leading to a completely tone-deaf climax..."
- George Beremov at (CineMarvellous!) - (4.5/10) "...One of the dumbest, most derivative, unimaginative, and atrociously un-scary haunted house flicks in recent memory...."
- Marc Savlov at (The Houston Chronicle) - (1/5 Stars) "The film is a muddle all the way through, although audience antiquarian architects will know going in that a “disappointment room” is an actual thing that exists outside of, say, H.P. Lovecraft’s ichthyopocene Arkham [sic]."
Synopsis (SPOILERS)
Spoiler Section (Highlight to Read)
A woman moves with her husband and young son to a creepy house in rural North Carolina to recover from a trauma, and uncovers a disturbing locked room hidden in the attic, leading to her unraveling the mysteries of her own and the house's secrets.
Notes
Comments, Trivia, Dedication
Spoiler Section (Highlight to Read)
A lot of footage was left on the cutting room floor during post-production. This includes a flashback of Judge and Mrs. Blacker throwing an elegant party in a beautiful garden (which is overgrown in the present day), with the disappointments room overlooking it. Dana, looking for Lucas, walks through this party in disbelief of what she's seeing. It would have added to the unfolding of Dana finding out about the child's story of abuse, sparking her curiosity to go see the woman who knows all about the history of disappointments rooms. Another cut scene involves the German Shepherd that kills the cat, and Dana has a vision of her son being attacked by the dog. All of it leads up to the fact that Mrs. Blacker was attacked and killed by her husband's dog, and he did nothing to stop it.
Associated Mythos Elements
- setting: Southern Gothic
- fiction: contrast with Lovecraft stories such as "The Unnameable (fiction)", "Shadow Over Innsmouth (fiction)", "Thing on the Doorstep (fiction)", and "Colour Out of Space (fiction)", which contain subtle references to characters being locked away in "disappointments rooms"
- location: a disappointments room in a decaying Southern mansion where the family "disappointments" (the insane, senile, mentally handicapped, deformed, hideously injured, or simply "ill-conceived") are imprisoned out of the sight of public scrutiny and shame, a common theme in Southern Gothic horror
Keeper Notes
- Any scenario you can invent involving the unraveling of dark secrets surrounding a "disappointments room" would probably have have a better chance of success than this movie seems to have enjoyed. Try populating such a room with the persons, evidence, or ghosts of:
- An insane family member.
- A family member who knows a truth so terrible, it makes her sound insane when she tries to tell anyone.
- "Monsters" - either in the sense of a hideously deformed but otherwise innocent and normal child, or in a more supernatural or science-fiction sense.
- Senile family members who know terrible family secrets and can no longer contain them.
- An illegitimate child... perhaps not entirely human, or perhaps simply a normal human born out of wedlock from incest, sexual assault, adultery, a "mixed race" relationship, etc., and left abused and deteriorating in the secret prison (a horrible enough fate without injecting the supernatural!)
- The legitimate or illegitimate heir to a family fortune, perhaps deformed, or mad, or simply inconvenient to the family.
- The real family members, whom their monstrous duplicates or imposters have locked away!
- Victims of a body-theft, their minds swapped into the bodies of aged wizards, deformed half-breeds, or monsters from space.
- Victims of a family of monsters, vampires, cannibals, etc.
- Where else would you lock the dangerous, insane, immortal and perhaps no-longer-entirely-human family cultist away?
- Beloved family members, sudden and unexpected victims of Lovecraftian monsters, twisted, corrupted, and maddened by the presence of the unnatural, now a shell of their former selves left to haunt and torment their distressed families....
