Parents' Guide to Cellar Door

What starts out as a provocative idea for a movie soon turns into a soggy soap opera, focusing on ill-behaved characters and loosening its suspenseful grip to the point of nothingness. As Cellar Door begins, it brims with promise. Sara and John's interactions are ticklishly genuine, and we can feel their connection. The movie drops a clue about how John is impatient to know their baby's sex but Sara can wait, foreshadowing the cellar door. She's a mathematician, and he's an architect, so we know they have some brains—or at least, they should. ("I'm a know-it-all, and she's always right," jokes John.) Their scene with Fishburne's Emmett is filled with intrigue; Fishburne seems to be choosing his words carefully and making his gestures with precision so that things seem just a little off-balance. ("It's like the beginning of a horror movie," says John; too bad he's wrong.)

Then the characters start to act as if they're totally empty-headed. John sneaks around, trying to avoid telling Sara that he's being charged with sexual harassment, attempting to meet with the woman who's charged him, and hiding secretly obtained plans for the house under their bed. Everything else seems ill-conceived, too, such as a sexual harassment case that magically seems to solve itself, with no involvement from the accused. Overall, Cellar Door seems timid, tiptoeing around what it's really about, and—in the end—afraid to open its own door.