The Cellar (2022 film)

Lore & Background

Brian and Kiera Woods move into an old house with their teen daughter Ellie and son Steven. While the couple is away, the children discover a secret room in the cellar containing strange formulas, symbols, and artwork. They play a recording of a man reciting formulas and counting up slowly. Later that night, the power shuts off, and Ellie begins acting oddly before disappearing. The police believe she ran away, as she had done before. Kiera investigates the history of the secret room and learns that the symbols spell out 'Leviathan' and that the equation represents dimensions. She visits the elderly daughter of a prior owner, John Fetherston, who tells Kiera that her father allowed Leviathan contact with the human world in hopes of saving her brother Jack, but the evil took over the house. Kiera returns home to find that Brian has discovered shapes and symbols over the doors that, combined with Leviathan, mean 'Baphomet.' Baphomet captures Steven, and the family is drawn into a demonic dimension where they begin counting upwards.

Reader's Guide

The Cellar is a modest entry in the supernatural horror genre, notable for its international co-production between Ireland and Belgium and its release on the streaming platform Shudder. Shot in November 2020 in Roscommon, Ireland, the film premiered at South by Southwest in March 2022. Its critical reception was poor, holding a 31% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 62 reviews, with the consensus calling it 'a mostly musty exercise in second-rate supernatural horror.' Despite this, the film explores themes of family, loss, and the dangers of occult dabbling, using a counting motif and demonic entities like Leviathan and Baphomet. Its significance lies in its attempt to blend folk horror with modern family drama, though it failed to achieve widespread acclaim or cultural impact.

Did You Know?

• The film was shot in November 2020 in Roscommon, Ireland.
• It premiered at South by Southwest in March 2022.
• The symbols in the secret room spell out 'Leviathan' and the equation represents dimensions.
• The film holds a 31% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 62 reviews.

The Narrative and Its Central Mystery

The Cellar follows the Woods family—parents Brian and Kiera, their teenage daughter Ellie, and younger son Steven—who relocate to a large old estate. When the parents are pulled away to work, the two children wander into the cellar and stumble upon a hidden chamber whose walls are covered in enigmatic formulas, symbols, and carved artwork. They find a recording of a man reciting equations and counting upward before Ellie switches it off. That same night the electricity fails, and when Kiera guides Ellie over the phone to locate the breaker, something shifts in the girl's behavior. By the time the parents rush back, Ellie has vanished. The police dismiss the situation, noting Ellie has run off before and always returned. Kiera, refusing to accept that explanation, begins digging into the property's past and the fate of a former resident named John Fetherston, uncovering a far darker truth about what dwells beneath the house and why it has been waiting for a new family to arrive.

Production and International Collaboration

The Cellar is the product of an international co-production between Ireland and Belgium, a partnership that shaped its practical, location-driven approach. Principal photography took place in November 2020 in the county of Roscommon, Ireland, giving the film a distinctly rural, grounded visual texture that contrasts with the otherworldly forces at play within its narrative. Brendan Muldowney served as both writer and director, maintaining a singular creative vision from script to screen. The cast is anchored by Elisha Cuthbert as Kiera Woods and Eoin Macken as Brian, with the two children completing the family unit at the story's center. After completing production, the film traveled to the South by Southwest festival in March 2022 for its premiere, before finding its broader audience through Shudder's streaming platform on 15 April 2022. The Shudder release positioned the film squarely within the genre-horror streaming space, targeting viewers who gravitate toward atmospheric, character-driven supernatural thrillers rather than franchise-driven spectacle.

Critical Reception and Audience Positioning

The Cellar's critical reception was decidedly mixed, landing at a 31% score on Rotten Tomatoes based on 62 critic reviews. The site's consensus summary captures the general critical sentiment: while the film avoids the most predictable pitfalls of the haunted-house subgenre, it ultimately reads as a mostly musty exercise in second-rate supernatural horror. This assessment suggests reviewers found the film competent in its structural choices—its deliberate pacing, its focus on a family unit under siege, its use of a confined domestic space—yet insufficiently original or thrilling in execution. The film's placement on Shudder, a platform known for curated genre programming, likely shaped expectations among the reviewing audience, who may have measured it against the platform's stronger offerings. For a film that builds its tension around slow-burn dread, symbolic discovery, and a family's escalating desperation, the lukewarm critical response highlights the difficulty of distinguishing a well-constructed but familiar supernatural narrative from the more inventive entries in a crowded genre.

Thematic Architecture and Horror Mechanics

At its core, The Cellar operates through a layered symbolic and mathematical language that transforms a domestic horror setting into something approaching cosmic horror. The secret cellar room contains formulas and symbols that Kiera deciphers as spelling Leviathan, with the equations representing complex dimensional constructs. Later, Brian identifies additional markings above the doors that, when combined with the Leviathan reference, yield the name Baphomet. The counting motif—Ellie and Steven counting upward on the recording, Kiera counting steps to the cellar, Brian and Steven counting downward before Baphomet's appearance, and the final image of countless figures counting up in the demon's dimension—functions as a ritualistic thread binding the narrative together. The house itself becomes a living, hostile entity, its geometry shifting as the cellar elongates into a corridor and its boundaries dissolve as the family crosses into the other dimension. The twist that the family's apparent escape is actually a deeper entrapment, requiring them to join the counting themselves, reframes the entire film as a descent rather than a rescue.

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