Director: Kurt Martin Screenplay: Kurt Martin Cast: Alyssa Sutherland, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Goran D. Kleut, Lauren Grimson, Gilbert Bradman, Bobby Gilchrist Year: 2026
There's a kind of frustration only low-budget horror produces, and it's watching a good idea mistreated by its own execution. I don't mean bad films, which forget themselves. I mean the ones with enough material to be something and waste it on the script, the casting, the dialogue. "The Room Below" is exactly that, and the only thing keeping it inside the range of the watchable is its lead.
In "The Room Below" we follow Mia (Alyssa Sutherland), a woman who lost her son Axel to cancer and never came out of it. The film finds her already settled into her grief, writing children's books that no longer come, living alongside manifestations inside her own house, and fixing on a boy she meets at a park until she decides to take him home and lock him in a basement room to treat him as Axel. When John Perkins (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a retired detective, starts looking into the boy's disappearance, what Mia has built begins to give.
Alyssa Sutherland is the reason this film exists in any meaningful sense. We watched her carry "Evil Dead Rise" on enormous physical work, and before that "Blood Vessel", and here she does something harder: getting something out of a script that gives her almost nothing. She's the only one in the cast who seems to be building a person rather than reciting lines. When the film holds, it holds on her face.
The rest of the cast is a serious problem, and it's a double one. The two characters who spend the most screen time with Mia, the boy Simon (Gilbert Bradman) and the detective John Perkins, are badly written before they're badly played: the dialogue doesn't sound like how people speak, the reactions don't match what just happened, and the decisions exist because the plot needs them. On that foundation, the performances sink them completely. They're hard to watch, and since the film depends on Mia having someone to push against, every shared scene subtracts from what Sutherland is building alone.
Which is a shame, because the ideas are there. The play with Mia's perception, what she sees inside the house against what the film chooses to show us, is the script's best device and the one that conveys her state most clearly. Her being a children's author isn't decorative either: her work depended on her son, and the loss took the son and the work in one move. There's a good film hidden in that material.
What buries it is the inconsistency. "The Room Below" is full of things that don't survive five seconds of thought, from logistics the plot requires and never justifies to character reactions explicable only by the need to reach the next scene. Motherhood horror has a demanding tradition, and this film measures itself against "Huesera: The Bone Woman" and "The Babadook" without the script discipline those had. The difference is that in both of those, every strange decision the character made was held up by the internal logic of her trauma. Here too many are held up by convenience.
One thing does deserve credit: the film understands that the trauma isn't motherhood itself, it's having the place of mother taken from you. Mia isn't broken by having been a mother, she's broken by having stopped being one, and that distinction gives the story what little real weight it carries.
Anyone coming for Alyssa Sutherland will find what they came for, and that may well be enough. Anyone wanting a grief drama with horror that works as a complete piece, or who simply can't tolerate dialogue that sounds like a first draft, will be frustrated long before the end. There's a good idea here, and it never became a film.
Rating: 4/10
Ending Explained (Spoilers ahead)
The film explains Mia in pieces. Losing Axel wasn't the only blow: after his death she attempted suicide by throwing herself from a balcony. She survived, but the fall left an injury that would prevent her having children again. The grief and that second loss together are what push her into dissociating and into seeing her son in Simon.
The manifestations in the house resolve on the psychological side. The entity Mia lives with and talks to exists for us because the film places us inside her perception, but the tell is that the people around her don't see it: Simon can't. It's her trauma given physical form, and it doubles as the alibi that lets her justify what she goes on to do.
Locked in the basement, Simon becomes Axel. Mia starts administering chemotherapy to him, which is where the script loses its footing entirely: chemotherapy isn't obtained without a diagnosis, a referral and money, and the film never bothers explaining how a children's author has it in her house. She also uses him as a muse. Her best period as a writer was when she wrote for Axel, and with Simon she recovers what she had lost.
John Perkins, the detective Mia befriends, came from her own therapy group, also lost a son, and left the police afterwards. Eventually it's revealed that Mia had already done this to his son: she took him and treated him as Axel, the same story we're watching with Simon.
Simon dies, and Mia buries him in the yard. Beside his grave there are three more, other children, and each has an object on it: an oyster on Simon's, a pirate hat on another. Each child was the inspiration for one of her books, and the object marks which.
The close is the best-thought-out thing in the film. For much of the runtime Mia appears to be pregnant, and it turns out to be false, something she put on. And early on we see her painting a wall of her house. In the final scene she fakes the pregnancy again and paints the same wall again, a different colour. The cycle restarts. The film neither punishes her nor cures her: it leaves her exactly where she started, and tells us this has happened three times already and is about to happen a fourth.
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