Review of The Other Side of the Door (2016) by Farah R — 24 Jul 2016

A truly horrible abomination and it does not deserve to be called a horror movie because it is not one. The story follows a married couple whose son had died in an accident and the mother blames herself for his death.

The movie is set in India. That was important to note because of what follows. They have a housemaid who tells the mother that there exists a temple in which you can communicate with the dead through a locked door, a door which is essentialy a portal to the dead dimension, and if you open the door, the dead can walk through them and find themselves haunting the living world.

Guess what the mother does after talking to her son? That is correct. She opens the door and the son starts possessing people. It's really stupid. The biggest problem with this movie is that it's boring and doesn't make a lot of sense.

The acting from the adults is okay, nothing extraordinary, but the kids are awful. Whoever played the daughter, Lucy, is awful. Or maybe it was the script, whatever it was, it was miserable. There are many moments which are not explained and really did need explaining.

There's a scene about halfway through the movie where the mother and daugther are walking through the street and they come across a car accident and the victim is laying down on the floor, presumably dead.

So far, nothing wrong, but. Yeah, but. The guy on the floor turns his head around to face the mother and his face goes all crazy. His mouth opens wide and his eyes go black, which is what happens very often in these mainstream "horror" movies.

And that scene ends there. No explanation as to why that happened. We're just supposed to accept it happen because ghosts. Horrible. Another thing this movie does poorly is jumpscares! As to be expected, you can see them coming and they're just a messed up character's face followed by a loud noise.

I don't hate on jumpscares all the time, I just hate on them when they're badly done. For example, the jumpscares in Insidious are genuinely terrifying because you don't see them coming. Here, you know they're coming so you don't even get startled.

There are also some truly hilarious scenes where the mother reads The Jungle Book to her dead son's ghost in his bedroom. Totally stupid and funny, and not even remotely scary. The ending I'll spoil because you've probably seen this movie before even if you haven't seen it (it's fairly similar to any other attempt at a horror movie in the past 10 years by Hollywood).

In the end the mother somehow trades places with her son, or dies, I'm not sure, I was sharpening the knife to kill myself later with, so I didn't pay too much attention to what was happening, and there she is in the dead dimension and now it's her husband talking to her and he opens the door.

The movie ends there. Oh my God, what a horrible, horrible movie. There aren't any good sides to it except the setting and atmosphere, that was alright. As you might tell, I cannot recommend this movie whatsoever.

It's probably one of the worst horror movies I ever had the displeasure of watching.