The Disappointments Room

After her razor-sharp, show-stopping turn earlier this year in Love & Friendship, Kate Beckinsale is back to sleepwalking through a shoddy genre film. I would say that this marks the end of the short-lived Beckinsale-aissance, but D.J. Caruso’s The Disappointments Room was actually filmed in 2014 and delayed for two years when Relativity Media went bankrupt, so it’s up to next year’s Underworld: Blood Wars to officially kill her momentum. Beckinsale plays Dana, a psychologically iffy New York architect who moves to the country with her family to recover from an unspoken tragedy, only to find that their new home is stuffed to the rafters with haunted house clichés and ham-fisted horror movie callbacks. The script is credited to Caruso and Wentworth Miller (Stoker), and while it deserves credit for mixing some gothic surrealism in with the jump scares, all of the film’s ambitions get betrayed by the perfunctory execution. D.B.