Thanks for visiting ING Movies again. The Cellar is a terrifying 2022 horror film that I’d like to show you today. Ahead, spoilers. Keep an eye out and be cautious. Up in the countryside, the Woods family is settling into their new home. While Kira and Brian are understandably pleased with the home they’ve purchased for their kids—and Steven is too—things are looking up for Ellie.
Leaving her pals behind has been the worst part, and she also feels distant from her parents, who she believes don’t get her. Zaos is a really particular house. Over all the doors save one that only has a pentagon, there’s an ancient artwork of a guy raising a finger, and characters from an unknown alphabet with a triangle beneath them.
After a lacklustre exploration of the cellar, they make their exit, but Ellie is stopped in her tracks as she tries to escape. There’s a problem with the lock that prevents her from opening it, and she starts to grow afraid whenever she senses something darkly approaching. Luckily, Brian finds the key hanging by the door and uses it to let her out.
Later that night, Kira calls Ellie to watch Stephen so she and Brian may attend an urgent business meeting at the workplace. A mysterious person starts making Ellie jump while she’s talking on the phone with an old acquaintance. It’s simply Stephen, clad in a cloak and clutching an unusual-looking skull he discovered in a secret recess in the rec room.
Ellie investigates the secret chamber, which no one in the family had ever heard of before, and discovers a plaque commemorating Solvec Coagula, along with an antique record player and an abacus. Steven inquires about the record player and mentions that he has heard rumours about the house’s former owner, a witch who allegedly formed a pact with Satan. The recording begins with a man’s voice reading the equation written on the record before counting begins, and Ellie works it out.
A few hours down the road, an eerie gust of wind blows in from the basement and knocks out electricity across the home. Calling her mum for assistance, Ellie gets Kira’s advice to check the circuit breaker in the basement. Ellie refuses to do this since she is too terrified to enter the dark room; in response, Kira teaches her a mental trick: counting to herself.
Kira cheers Ellie on as she counts and follows her step-by-step instructions on the phone. Ellie reaches step 10, which is supposed to be the last step, but she shuts her eyes and falls. Kira and Brian quickly get back to their house after overhearing her count to thirty and her complete lack of response to their questions.
Upon arrival, they are unable to locate Ellie within the residence and proceed to contact the authorities. After a brief search of the nearby woods turns up nothing, the police advise Ellie’s parents to wait for news since their daughter has fled the house before and there is no sign of a crime. Ellie is likely staying with a friend.
The following morning, the family calls on some neighbours for assistance before returning to the woods for a second round of searching; however, this time, they come up empty-handed. Although Brian acknowledges that Ellie’s flight was understandable given her anger, Kira is convinced that something occurred to Ellie due to the unsettling tone of her voice when counting.
Kira does not remember to collect Stephen from school the following day; it is not until her teacher contacts her that she remembers. She starts hanging up missing person posters. Kira takes her kid to the police station while they’re together to check for updates, but the detective there doesn’t have anything to share. Not only have they not located Ellie’s phone, but they have also combed through surveillance footage from bus and train terminals and contacted her pals, but so far, no leads.
The detective can only say that Ellie has been the victim of online harassment and bullying for some time. Kira, devastated because she was unaware of that, requests forensics examine the basement since she is certain her daughter did not go away. The detective has to tell her again that he can’t do anything further because this isn’t a criminal case.
Steven makes his ball bounce against the cellar door as Kira searches for the phrase “saw that coagula” online after returning home and noticing it etched above the entrance door. The search results show that this term has ties to ancient alchemy and denotes the processes of dissolving and coagulating.
Images of a strange snake and a five-pointed star are among the related ones. Kira invites Steven over, her interest aroused; her son, who had dropped his ball near the basement, comes running over to join her. When asked about the night Ellie went missing, Steven assures his mom that nothing out of the norm occurred. The sole alteration they made was to activate the record player.
Kira disregards it as insignificant and returns to her computer to examine Ellie’s social media accounts. It is there that Kira learns her daughter has an anarchist tattoo, a secret she has never shared with her family. After that, Kira chooses to double-check the basement once more. She takes a brief moment to study the pentagon atop the door before bringing a light tube inside.
Once again, she finds an equation at the end of the steps that corresponds to the one on the record player, along with Roman numerals. The most shocking part, though, is when the ultraviolet light from the tube exposes a wall covered with a slew of terrifying faces. After this, the police dispatch a forensics team, one of whom inadvertently sends Steven’s ball tumbling into the basement.
The only other piece of information the police have is that the picture has been in the same spot since the 1950s, which is somewhat disappointing. Brian says they don’t know much about the house’s past other than that they got it cheap from an elderly woman and that’s about all the information they have.
As the sun sets and everyone in the family drifts off to sleep, Steven wakes Kira up because he’s wet in bed. Kira takes solace in listening to her daughter’s voice on the answering machine after she changes his sheets. However, out of nowhere, Kira hears Ellie’s voice counting on the other side of the washbasin.
Kira exits the loo still hearing the voice, so she decides to pursue it. Eventually, she finds out that it originates in the basement. It takes far longer than it should to reach the last step because, as she steps into it, she unintentionally kicks Stephen’s ball, sending it tumbling down the stairs.
Even Kira, who also goes downstairs and switches on the light, can’t find the ball. Upon waking up in the morning, Brian discovers that Kira has abandoned her bed. He searches for her and sees that she is gazing at the symbols displayed over the entrances. On another sheet of paper, she has the equation that was found in the cellar.
Although Brian empathises with the feeling of helplessness, he does not believe that fixating on meaningless symbols can bring any relief. Kira then contacts her realtor to inquire about the prior owner’s details. His sole knowledge is that she was the house’s previous owner’s daughter—a famous academic—but he says he will do his best to learn more.
Kira, who is always looking for a new activity, decides to photograph the symbols that adorn the doors before heading to work. She asks her secretary to look for the significance of the pictures while she’s at a meeting, but she’s too nervous to pay attention, so she leaves the meeting early.
Kira is about to go when her assistant interrupts and explains that the symbols spell out the name of a sea monster from Jewish legend called Leviathan in Hebrew glyphs. Steven got into a fight after hearing that Ellie is dead, so Kira finds him bleeding when she goes to get him from school. Upon returning home, Kira conducts an online search for details regarding the Leviathan. She discovers that the depictions align with the serpent she had observed alongside the Solvet Coagula story.
The next thing she knows, she’s fiddling with the record player, and the abacus in the living room starts to tinkle on its own as the voice starts counting. As he approaches the concealed compartment—which happens to be open on its own—Steven starts counting along with him. Thankfully, Kira becomes aware of his words and promptly silences the record player. He then quickly rushes up to his kid and intervenes.
Steven demonstrates no recollection of his recent actions when asked about what transpired. After that, Kira approaches the artwork depicting the man signalling with his finger. John Featherston is his name, she learns, and the artwork also has Hebrew characters. After Kira searches for his identity online, she learns that, with the exception of their daughter, his entire family has vanished from this house.
Just then, out of nowhere, a strange breeze blows in through the basement door, knocking out the electricity. From behind the cellar door, Steven starts pleading for aid, and Kira quickly races to unlock it, but she can’t locate the key. She quickly turns away from the animal eye staring back at her through the keyhole, only to see the real Steven in the hallway.
The electricity returns and, out of nowhere, the cellar door opens by itself, exposing the key that had been lying on the floor the entire time. After Kira uses the torch on her phone to access the cellar, she rehangs the key. As soon as she steps inside, the door shuts behind her. She calls out to Steven for assistance, but he can’t reach the key since he’s too short. Instead, he goes and gets a chair.
Kira reaches down to peer into the cellar once again as she waits, but she drops her phone, which triggers whatever is down there to begin breathing heavily and approach. Kira is frantic to escape as the monster starts to make its way up the stairs. Lucky for her, Brian gets there in the nick of time to unlock the door.
Telling Brian later on, Kira mentions that her phone disappeared and that she felt a presence down there. She brings up the fact that the Featherston family had also gone missing, similar to Ellie, but Brian believes she’s hallucinating. Buran tries to reassure her by searching the basement for her phone, but all he discovers is a clump of hair.
Kira visits the National College of Mathematics the following day to speak with the brilliant mathematician Dr. Remy Furnette, who is a member of the Featherston wing. After Kira hands him the equation she found in the cellar, he reads it out loud, causing the lights to briefly flicker. Fernette fills her in on further details about Featherston while they work on the problem.
Erwin Schrodinger, the renowned physicist who famously demonstrated that a cat in a box might be considered both dead and living, used to work with him at this very office. Prior to Featherston’s son’s illness and subsequent withdrawal from academic life, he had close ties to Schrodinger. Kira purchased the house from his daughter Rose, but Rose has never spoken about what happened to her father since she never fully recovered, thus no one knows what happened to him.
Though this is more complicated than anything he has encountered previously, Fournette is able to create a visual representation of the equation, which he interprets as representing additional dimensions. Since he needs some time to think about it, he says he’ll give Kira a call when he has finished. Kira returns home with a brand-new cell phone at a later time. Upon activation, she receives a call from Fournette, who informs her that he has been attempting to contact her for some time, but a peculiar voice has been picking up her calls, solely offering a counting response.
Next, he says that he and a coworker have discussed the equation, and that he thinks it has something to do with a subfield of mathematics that was developed by mediaeval alchemists. Some kind of unfinished incantation or ritual, with clear ties to other dimensions, it appears. This coworker has also before discovered a comparable equation in a Belgian residence where the family mysteriously disappeared.
As Steven waits in the rec room for the abacus to start moving on its own again, Brian comes to see how Kira is doing. Kira presents Brian with the data she has collected. The home is called Zaos in Greek, meaning the emptiness before time or the abyss, and Leviathan is the snake of the abyss.
Brian tries to demolish the equation plaque in an effort to distract her from his belief that she is placing too much significance on decorations. But the hammer does nothing but bounce around, leaving no visible damage. The record player starts playing just then, and Steven goes to the secret room to find Ellie, who is pale and counting while revealing glyphs carved into her face.
When Steven’s parents arrive, they find that Ellie has left with only her phone and that the record player has become stuck on 10. Steven screams out for aid. Her real estate agent calls Kira the following day to tell her where to locate Featherston’s daughter. Kira arrives at the nursing home and sees an elderly Rose confined to a wheelchair within the chapel. The nurse has cautioned Kira that Rose doesn’t communicate much these days.
Kira confides in Rose about Ellie and begs for her assistance, deciding to give it a shot nevertheless. Rose notes “Leviathan,” but clarifies that it isn’t the actual name, following a brief period of quiet. Her father brought this one of hell’s seven princes here to heal her sick sibling. Not only is the cellar included in the rite, but the entire home.
Kira attempts to contact Fernette on her way back, but all she hears is static and a voice counting. At the same time, Brian has begun his own investigation. When the pentagon and triangles are joined, a five-pointed star is formed. The star encircled by glyphs stands for Baphomet, the demon who guards the entrance to hell.
Its arms read “Solve Coagula 2,” and the image shows him mimicking Featherston’s hand gesture in the painting. Kira sees everything and agrees with Rose that the home was clearly built around it. At the same moment that Stephen loses control of his drone and follows it down the cellar, counting each step, Kira turns on the record player to explain that the equation probably opens the gate.
At the bottom, Baphomet awaits him, and Stephen lets out a scream as the power goes out. He is pursued swiftly by his parents, who discover only the drone. They then proceed to search the house, but to no avail. They hear a voice counting as Stephen’s ball bounces down the stairs, and they follow the sound to discover their kid on the verge of entering the secret compartment.
After learning that Steven is quite feverish, they whisk him away to observe his condition. Kira attempts to remove Steven’s shirt, but discovers a star etched across his chest as Brian fetches water. Steven starts counting again after suddenly recalling riding a horned beast. Kira returns to the search for Brian and this time finds him in another room, counting down. He then proclaims that it is here once he hits zero.
At the same time that the sounds of baphomet are audible, the door to the cellar opens on its own, releasing a strong breeze. Even when Kira tries to hide in another room, the monster finds her. In a desperate move, she grabs a torch and dashes into the cellar. Kira quickly dashes towards the door at the end of the stairs—which have suddenly become considerably longer—in her pursuit of escaping the beast.
She ducks behind a low wall till Baphomet bolts out the door, and then she investigates. She crosses a tunnel and is startled to see a vast open area teeming with wandering spirits who are counting themselves in a queue. Ellie, whose tattoo Kira discovers, is one of these spirits.
As she hurries back to the stairs, dragging her daughter after her, Kira tries to outrun Baphomet’s pursuit while simultaneously dropping the torch. A return to the house finds Kira re-energizing the power and sealing the cellar entrance to confine the beast. After ensuring the family’s safety, Kira advises them to depart; however, as she nears the door, she discovers that her torch is lying on the floor.
As her family starts to count, Kira opens the door and sees the lengthy stairs beyond. The home is revealed to be on desolate ground, no longer in the woods, and Kira starts counting at the same time.
[imdb show=”transparent” data=”detailed”]tt14550642[/imdb]
