Movie Review: The Disappointments Room

Wow, where to begin on this one? It has been a long time since I’ve seen a movie that held my interest so little and had zero, if any, payoff. For the hour and a half you sit there, the ending makes really no sense, but that is par for the course as the entire movie almost seems like a slapdash plot tied together with Kate Beckinsale’s terrible American accent. On a side discussion, is it really that hard for Brits to do American accents? Emma Watson has also struggled with this in the past (Bling Ring, Perks of Being a Wallflower). 

Back to the movie. From the beginning, you should know that there isn’t much substance to the movie, the trailers were only sort of interesting, but I still though, the idea is cool. The story revolves around a family, mom, dad and kid who are moving from the big city to the country (New York). The mom is an architect and the dad doesn’t seem to have a discernible job. The kid is your typical moderately annoying child in a movie, but for some reason, horror movies seem to have an abundance of these. On the flip side, Stranger Things on Netflix had lots of kids, not one of them were annoying.

The family moves in and the house is a wreck. The mom hires a really cute guy to help her fix it and he makes overt implications to have an affair. The house has a secret room in the attic and when the mom and dad finally get in, there’s no handle on the inside and Beckinsale’s character thinks she’s trapped in there. If this is as disjointed as it sounds, this is how the plot was running. The mom is clearly suffering from a psychotic break and we later learn that she suffocated her baby by falling asleep on it. Dear lord, who thought that would be a good scene to put into this movie? Friends from the city, or somewhere come visit, one of them was Angela from Bones, so that was fun, and she gets drunk and almost kills her kid. The family just up and move out, end of movie.

Yeah, the movie made the story, which was supposed to center around these rooms built back in the ‘old’ days called Disappointments Rooms. When people had children that didn’t look normal, they’d build a room, lock the child in and wait for the inevitable end. Sounds like a solid premise for a movie, something along the lines of The Orphanage. The execution could not have been worse. The movie instead centered around the really uninteresting story of why they mom was kinda crazy and could have played that against the room if there had been some backstory to tie the two together. There was not. I'm developing a new test, like the Bechdel test, to gauge whether there are any strong female/minority characters. This movie failed on all fronts at this. Don’t waste your time and money on this movie. It was a literal disappointment, but I guess I should have known given the name.