One cryptic door serves as the seperation between two worlds, in Fox’s latest scare treat “The Other Side of the Door”. Written and directed by Johannes Roberts, the film centers around a family who lives an idyllic existence with very little excitment. That all changes when a tragic accident takes the life of their young son Oliver (Logan Crerer). The inconsolable and emotionally wrecked mother (Sarah Wayne Callies) learns of an ancient ritual that will bring him back to say a final goodbye. For the chance to see her boy again if only for a day, Maria travels to an ancient temple, where a mysterious door serves as a bridged portal between the living and the dead. Things don’t exactly fall in to place when she disobeys a sacred warning to never open that door, thus upsetting the balance between life and death that will put Maria, her husband Michael (Jeremy Sisto) and her daughter Lucy’s (Sofia Rofinsky) lives in grave danger. “The Other Side of the Door” is rated R for bloody gore and violence.

“The Other Side of the Door” starts off with a real gripping sense of death and the frightening reality of finally letting go. In that sense, the movie feels more like a psychological thriller than a horror film that it is classified as. We are introduced right into the middle of this Mother who had to make a chilling decision on which child to save, and its because of that decision that this woman rightfully hasn’t moved on. It’s in these opening 40 minutes where I feel like the movie peaked, and never quite got back up to that moutain top that it once reached. The movie sidelines it’s heartbreaking forefront in favor of a second and third act that fills the movie with typical horror movie troupes, including jump scares that are poorly timed and meaningless. The movie feels like it belongs somewhere in the early 2000’s string of Asian remakes like “The Ring” or “The Grudge” because its lack of expositon for the characters backstories and the horror that surrounds them, blends terribly with the cheap overall design of the movie. The movie finds this second on level of importance, in favor of oddball imagery like makeup voodoo men whose existence is never explained once. If this sounds familiar, its because those films I mentioned a sentence ago used the same technique with Asian children. If they make creepy faces, it will be enough to to fool our audience into thinking this is creepy. Not so. So much about the “other”world in this film is never explained, so the movie left me grabbing at any little detail, searching for clarity.

The film is wise enough to play off to the audience that what is going on inside of this woman’s head is starting to come true in her real life. Her nightmares are becoming reality, and she has trouble distinguishing the difference between them. Where this idea feels inconsistent is in the abuse of dream scenes. This is one of those cliches that really gets on my nerves because it almost feels like a waste of screenplay. If the film does it once, fine, but this movie had three different dream sequences that all made the stuff going on in the real world feel a little lacking by comparison. There are also times when Michael and Lucy experience some of the weird things that Maria is going through, so it makes even less sense when later in the film they try to play it off like she is crazy. These are only a couple of the inconsistencies that took away from a sincere underlying issue that had me invested for the first half of the movie. It never quite feels like the same movie by the end, and I would’ve been happy to remove the horror from the material all together because it simply wasn’t needed.

Major respect goes to Sarah Wayne Callies who took what would otherwise be considered as re-used table scraps from other films like “Silent Hill” that did it better, and make the most of her performance. As Maria, Callies expresses heartbreak in excrutiatingly traumatic facials that registered her pain brilliantly. For the most part, this is kind of her own one woman show as Jeremy Sisto disappears oddly throughout the film for long periods of time. So when Sarah has to carry the load, she proves that she is up to the task of playing the character at various levels. If the film wasn’t in such a rush at 91 minutes, I would be in favor of more screen time going to Maria’s guilt to making such a haunting choice. It’s a character written and performed well because we feel empathy for her, and wish for resolve from her sleepless reality.

“The Other Side of the Door” opens itself to gripping ideas that really could’ve pushed this film as something more than just another one and done week at the box office. The proverbial door slams itself shut during an uneven second half of the movie that is guaranteed to reach for the usual genre moans once the credits hit.

4/10