The Other Side of the Door

Ideally, horror films are intended to be disturbing experiences. I just stubbed my toe, for free and in the comfort of my home, and the experience proved far more disturbing than The Other Side of the Door. Just two months into 2016, and I already find myself confronted with yet another actress from AMC’s The Walking Dead (Sarah Wayne Callies) trying to translate her small-screen B horror success into big box office. On the basis of these two pictures, I hope we’re not witnessing the nascent stages of a trend. The only thing I find genuinely surprising about this latest attempt is that it somehow managed to be even more tedious than January’s dismal Lauren Cohen vehicle The Boy. That film, at least, had the self-awareness to couch its Gothic melodrama in a suitable setting. Other Side, on the other hand, squanders its exotic locale and exploits Hindu mysticism as little more than set dressing. Were it not for the occasional Mumbai-establishing shot and the use of Aghori as boogeymen, this film could just as easily have taken place in Indiana as India.

You know you’re in trouble when the most recognizable names in your cast are an actress best known for a basic cable zombie show and Jeremy Sisto. I spent a good 20 minutes trying to remember why I knew who Sisto was, not because I really cared, but because I had to keep myself occupied somehow while slogging through Other Side’s interminable second act. Sofia Rosinsky, playing the couple’s young daughter, delivers a “performance” that epitomizes everything that can go wrong when a child actor is tasked with carrying significant scenes and led me to wonder if the girl knows how to pretend, much less act. Suchitra Pillar-Malik, playing the Fred Gwynne character in what amounts to a Hindu Pet Sematary, makes a passable effort to work with this abysmal script, but as the sole non-white principal, she’s obviously the first to die when things finally start to happen in the film’s back 20. The only actor in the cast who delivers his lines with any conviction or authenticity is Bruno the Golden Retriever, so of course he’s also killed off unceremoniously in the third act. When Hitchcock was discussing Sabotage with Truffaut, he mentioned a pivotal scene in which a young boy, sitting next to an old lady with a dog on a bus, is blown up. Hitch stated that the audience never forgave him for killing the dog,  and such might have been the case here had the film not long since squandered any good will it might have garnered from the audience over the previous hour.

A thoroughly amateurish production all around, Other Side fails on a variety of levels. The direction looks as though some exec turned a first-year film student loose with enough of a budget to send a second unit to India. The script is replete with the sort of baseline xenophobia and casual racism that underscores why imperialism has never been popular among the colonized. Director Roberts’ over-reliance on jump scares and tired horror cliches would challenge even the most stalwart genre completist, but it’s the script (co-written by Roberts) that drags the proceedings from bad to worse. Glacial pacing and unnatural dialogue, two of my cardinal sins of screenwriting, take a back seat here to the film’s insistence on telegraphing literally every plot point ad nauseam, up to and including a predictable stab at a twist ending that might’ve been impactful were I not already so sick of these characters’ incomprehensible decisions that literally any ending would’ve seemed a welcome mercy killing.

If you’ve seen or read the aforementioned Pet Sematary, you could easily watch the first and last 15 minutes of The Other Side of the Door and have a full understanding of its narrative. In both cases, a protagonist breaks a mystical rule that leads him or her down a road of pain, suffering and existential dread. If this review was following the story arc of such films, and were I taking up the mantle of Fred Gwynne/Suchitra Pillai-Malik as the wise sage issuing mystical prohibitions, I would tell you in hushed tones over a somber score that you must never, ever see The Other Side of the Door. “Sometimes, dead is better.” And sometimes, Pet Sematary is better. Rated R for some bloody violence.