The Other Side of the Door – Film Review by David Turpin

Directed by Johannes Roberts

Starring Sarah Wayne Callies, Jeremy Sisto, Suchitra Pillai-Malik, Sofia Rosinsky

With this India-set haunting/possession yarn, English low-budget horror specialist Johannes Roberts manages a budgetary uptick, but remains in the second division in most other regards.  Sarah Wayne Callies, formerly of The Walking Dead, plays Maria, an American woman living in Mumbai with her antique-trader husband Michael (Jeremy Sisto).  After their young son is drowned in a persuasively realised car accident, Maria is left despondent, shutting out Michael and her surviving small daughter Lucy (extravagantly coiffured pre-teen Sofia Rosinsky).

Although Maria doesn’t appear to have any job besides following her husband around the globe, she nevertheless also has a mysterious housekeeper, Pikki (Suchitra Pillai-Malik), who comes in handy when she mentions a mysterious temple where the dead can be contacted through a fussy ritual involving talking through a door.  Naturally, the door must never be opened – and, equally naturally, that’s exactly what Maria does.

This, then, is yet another repurposing of W. W. Jacobs’ The Monkey’s Paw (1902), in which parental bereavement avails of a creepily exotic supernatural thingumabob to bring the devil to the door.  Unfortunately, Roberts and his co-writer, Ernest Riera, haven’t found a specific way to expand the story to feature length.  Instead, we get a pot pourri of scary signifiers including, but not limited to, death cults, mouldering zombies, eerily calm demon children, pianos that play themselves, and nightmarish visions accompanied by a BOOM on the soundtrack.  The Mumbai setting, which seems to offer a wealth of visual and narrative possibilities, goes largely untapped – raising the suspicion that it has more to do with production investment than with the story itself.

Callies is perfectly competent as the distraught mother, but she – like Sisto – carries a stubbornly small-screen aura.  Clearly, the benchmark for this kind of thing is Naomi Watts’ turn in The Ring (2002), but Callies never comes close to wrestling the material into shape the way Watts did in that film – possibly because the thin writing gives her so little to work with.  As the daughter-in-peril, Rosinsky strikes a curious note.  Although her taciturn quality is unusual, perhaps even interesting, for a child actress, it doesn’t exactly help the viewer decode when she is or is not possessed by the spirit of her dead brother – a situation not helped by the muddled script.  The Indian characters are, for the most part, restricted to peering suspiciously at our heroine through windows and doorways, although Pillai-Malik does what she can with a part from Central Casting.  The mumbling cult members who pop up from time to time suggest an affection for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) more than any depth of research into Indian mythology and culture.

The film benefits from handsome, detailed production design by David Bryan and art direction by Prashant Laharia.  Although the measured pacing might try the patience of genre fans – and is ultimately unrewarded by the meagre pay-offs – it does at least provide an opportunity to enjoy the settings, which are more attractive and evocative than the nondescript suburbia in which this type of film often unfolds.