31 Days of Horror- Day 20: The Other Side of the Door (2016)

(dir. Johannes Roberts)

20th Century Fox

*First time viewing

A grieving mother learns of a ritual through which she can gain closure by speaking to her son one last time. But she breaks the rules, and tries to bring her son back with her. Something else follows.

The Other Side of the Door gets a lot of mileage from its setting. Yes, we’ve seen the grieving parents seeking to bring back their child before. And we’ve also seen ancient rituals performed with deadly results, prolonged by things that go bump in the night. But we haven’t seen it in India (or at least, to my knowledge, not in a Hollywood production.) The Other Side of the Door does have an interesting mythology to play off of. The crux around this film revolves around a door in an ancient temple, a temple in which if you bring the ashes of the dead then you are able to speak to your loved one for one last time. The keepers of this temple are shamans who cover themselves in the ashes of the dead and eat dead flesh. That’s the stuff nightmare fuel is made out of, and couple in a four-armed specter of death, Myrtu, and The Other Side of the Door has some interesting imagery to play with. But Myrtu is introduced late in the game and could have played a more prominent role in the narrative's horror,

 I was impressed earlier this by Johannes Roberts’ 47 Meters Down, which is powerful in its depiction of tension, even if the performances faltered. And since he’s directing The Strangers 2, a sequel I’ve been waiting nearly a decade for, I’ve got high hopes for his continued success. The Other Side of the Door definitely doesn’t have any issues with the performances. Sarah Wayne Callies and Jeremy Sisto both give different, and layered portrayals of grief’s toll on a parent in the respective roles of Maria and Michael. There are some creepy moments, especially one delivered by Michael and Maria’s young daughter, but for an R-rated horror film, there was a hope that some of these moments were pushed a little further. 

Scare Factor: 3/5 The Other Side of the Door is a neat low budget horror film .There’s a solid display of production design, and Americans caught within a culture, though a fictional aspect of it, is always interesting.