MOVIE REVIEW: The Disappointments Room (2016)
KATE BECKINSALE. The name immediately brings up my first encounter with her: Underworld. It was one of my first movie reviews, and I never forgot it. She was one fit lady that could act, despite the material. She’s been at this Hollywood stuff for 10+ years and hasn’t aged a day. My ears always perk up at her name, solely because the chances of her being in really tight pants again is possible and I wanna be there when it happens. Sure enough, The Disappointments Room does not disappoint on that subject, but it makes up for getting that right by getting everything else so incredibly WRONG.
Our first clue is the title: WHO PUTS THE WORD “DISAPPOINTMENT” IN THEIR TITLE? It’s a setup for a joke that ALWAYS comes. The movie starts awkwardly with Gilbert and Sullivan, a bullshit husband, and a child with a busted-ass haircut. Kate is stuck with these two knuckleheads while being an incredibly forward character for Hollywood: an architect that knows her way around a construction site without being made unattractive or homosexual due to the masculine nature of the workplace culture. The movie made up for that amount of progress by making her the unreliable narrator, bound by psych medicines and anxiety over the loss of her second child (i.e., the hysterical and irrational woman). How did the child die? We won’t find out until the last few minutes of the movie, which sucks hard and could have added much more to the character as a whole.
Children are a central part of the movie, since this movie takes what could be a purely psychological thriller and makes it into some breeder trash about children and what is done to them in their short period of life before adolescence. To escape the Big Apple (where Kate and her BS husband are from), they move to a new state and a new “fixer-upper” mansion from the turn of the 20th Century. While the town librarian was nice enough to send her a bunch of historical documents on the house and architectural stuff so Kate knew what she was getting into, she conveniently left out the newspaper clippings detailing the grisly deaths and murders that took place at the mansion every time a new set of people move in. Kate and her family will be the 6th or 7th family to move in, and this all happened because of a culture that encouraged the necessity of a “disappointments room”.
An actual designation before medical science and society could care for the differently abled and neuro-divergent, such a room would be used to hide these “disappointments” before they would be recorded by doctors, census takers, or polite society. The children would live and grow and die in that room with maybe one person that would come and go to feed them, and maybe a window if the parents were generous. Sometimes those parents were not so generous and killed a child to save the expense of caring for a child that would never be able to care for them. They would be buried on the property — in a marked grave, and sometimes not — instead of the cemetery as an attempt to hide their shame. Such shame caused a ghost from the death of a little girl and the man who killed her, her father — probably thinking he would go to heaven for his good deeds and contributions to society. His mindset might be why his ghost was so ANGRY and took it out on every family that moved in. All that said, the movie’s plot was a pale shadow compared to Kate Beckinsale’s tour de force performance in the third act.
A party is held by her BS husband on the same day Kate’s daughter died or it was Kate’s daughter’s birthday or something equally stupid to coincide an event with a person who is OBVIOUSLY still sensitive about it. Oddly enough, Kate comes back drunk and is unbelievably salty. She baked a cake to celebrate her dead daughter (because she’s crazy and flushed her meds down the toilet), but had no idea there would be guests…or more accurately, an audience.
Kate Beckinsale gives an amazing performance as a woman who can’t tell the difference between reality and hallucinations, who is simultaneously depressed and angry and hates everything…who pulls out a huge knife in front of dinner guests to “cut the cake”. Bullshit husband knows what’s up, but he’s so shitty he can’t stop Kate from flipping out and throwing food and breaking dishes and flipping the table like a mad gorilla. IT. WAS. GLORIOUS. It was, hands down, the best performance I’ve ever seen her give and the best part of the movie. And then the movie went down to brown-town, becoming extra shitty with their climax and ending. The ending was so bad, I began to think my movie theater WAS a disappointments room, as I was sorely disappointed by the abrupt ending, which resolved the immediate problem but not the greater problem at large: the evil Ghost Dad.
CHOICE CUTS:
- Did you know Lucas Till (aka Alex Summers from X-Men: Apocalypse) was in the film as the douchebag handyman? I thought it was Alex Pettyfer (who? Exactly.)
- FYI, disappointments rooms are real but not all are called as such. People are still obsessed with face and shame, and choose not to care for their sick and handicapped lest it bring scorn down on them…as opposed to scorn down upon them for NOT caring for their sick and handicapped.
- Damn, her husband was such a bullshit. Bullshit what? I don’t know, but seriously, fuck that guy. Sucks so hard.
- Man, the only way this could have been better if it hadn’t been made.
— previously published 9/25/2016 on Facebook Notes —
