Wednesday Review: The Other Side of the Door

I wish I had written my review of The Other Side of the Door the night I saw it, immediately after getting home. I was ready to let the film have it, but was tired and wanted to get some reading in before bed. So, a decision was made to delay writing it until the next day. By the time I woke up the next morning, the movie was so forgettable that it had almost left my mind completely. Now, as I sit here more than 24-hours after my initial viewing, I write only to somewhat salvage the wasted cost of my ticket by throwing up a blog post about this film.

The movie is objectively horrible. It's actually somewhat astonishing that a movie this bad isn't more easily remembered. It deals with a Western family living in India. When their car goes off the road, the mother is forced to choose between saving her unconscious daughter, or her son whose leg is trapped. She escapes with the daughter, leaving her son to drown.

She's told by her housekeeper that if she has her son cremated, and takes his ashes to a particular temple, she can hear his voice through a door. However, she's warned that if she opens the door the consequences will be dire (why the door can't be nailed shut, I don't know). I'm not sure if I need to waste my breath telling you what happens, but just in case a chihuahua is reading this: she goes to the temple, and opens the door, freeing her son's spirit to haunt her family.

Firstly, I'm a bit tempted to accuse this film of racism for it's portrayal of Hinduism. However, Wikipedia shows the film as a British-Indian co-production, and I can't claim enough knowledge of religious traditions in Indian to say for sure. Much of it seems like stereotypical savagery to me.

More significantly, the movie is simply badly made. The actors are terrible, the children especially, and there is not a single character in this film who has any real sign of identity beyond their role in the story. The children die before we get any real chance to know them. In fact, when the ghost of young Oliver demanded his mother read to him, it was literally the first time in the movie we had seen his mother read to him. The film makers lacked the basic competence to establish any relationship among these characters.

Meanwhile, the father spends much of the film away on business. This is clearly because the writers simply had nothing else to do with him during long portions of the film. That alone would not be a problem, but we're constantly treated to brief phone calls between him and his wife that add nothing to the story, and just remind us that he's in the movie. Apparently we're too dumb, or he's too bland, for us to remember that this family included a patriarch when he returns for the final act.

As for jump scares, they're everywhere. At one point a loud noise tells us that we're supposed to be scared because...a coffin contains a dead body. This isn't a coffin that appeared out of nowhere. The main character had ordered this coffin dug up, and was present while it was being unearthed. But we as an audience are still supposed to be horrified by the idea that the coffin has a dead body in it. And that's merely one of the legion of obnoxious jump scares that failed to make me so much as twitch.

It's almost as if someone set out to make a movie that's as bland and uninteresting as possible. I would be shocked to find that anyone involved in this movie had the slightest hint of a creative vision. This entire film screams an assembly-line, jump scare-ridden piece of generic trash that isn't worth anyone's time.

So, in brief, my advice is to save your money. This is a bad movie, with little to nothing to distinguish it from dozens of other bad movies, both past and future. If you're desperate to see a foreign horror, and only a recent one will do, then I would suggest The Forest. Say what you will of it, but that movie at least felt like it had a reason to exist.