The Other Side of the Door

**

I had The Other Side of the Door (2016) on DVR and so the whole plan was to get some content off today. I swear these days you can’t seem to get away from Sarah Wayne Callies. Sarah is on Colony and Prison Break, was a fixture of the early period of The Walking Dead, and showed up in the tornado disaster flick, Into the Storm (2014). That is the way the industry works. You see these consistent faces turn up everywhere. I’m honest in that I can’t consider myself necessarily a big fan. Maybe it is the characters she portrays or perhaps her characterizations irk me. Whatever the case, I found her tolerable in The Other Side… if still a bit annoying in some gnawing way. Maybe it is just her face. Perhaps that is what it is. I hate to be that way because I want to give all actors/actresses a chance, but sometimes there is just something about certain ones that naggingly aggravate me. Anyway, in The Other Side… Sarah is a grieving mother in Mumbai who lost her blond son in a serious accident where her SUV went off into a river, provoking her to make a Sophie’s Choice. The little girl, Lucy (Sofia Rosinsky), is free while the boy, Oliver, is pinned and unable to get loose. With water filling up the vehicle she will have to choose Lucy and swim her to the safety or else all three of them would die. Oliver’s begging to be saved is a potent, horrifying scene and the film doesn’t skirt its impact. It truly unsettles and haunts her to the point that she pelts her husband (Jeremy Sisto) with clubbing fists for being able to sleep soundly. So her Indian maid, Piki (Suchitra Pillar), tells her of a temple where she can go to say goodbye to her son’s spirit, using a ritual as means to summon him to a particular door. But she must not open the door because releasing Oliver from the other side unleashes an evil that isn’t her son but something else improper, not meant for the mortal world. But because we need a movie, she opens the door and Oliver, the Evil, enters their lives, not for the better. By the end of the film, Oliver’s presence is spoiled by something that erodes his soul, meant for reincarnation and released is altered from what he once was. The spiritual plot might make sense to some folks but just worked to me primarily to produce a menace released from a realm not meant to be. And then you have these ash-covered shaman (who eat “dead flesh”), often shown chanting, considered quite powerful. In the film they are presented as creepy specters, ghosting the plot until needed to remove the spirit set free, with “death” (Botet) coming to reclaim what belongs elsewhere.

Javier Botet’s contortionist ways make for quite an eerie “Myrti”, two hands covering “her” face while two hands are used to crawl, bend, and twist in ways that produce the same effects as the Ju-On and Ringu movies’ onryō. If you read about the film, it seems many films inspired The Other Side… from the likes of Mama (2013) to the Japanese horrors with their onryō. Whatever the case, the film looks great and has a fantastic setting using an American family transplanted to Mumbai, incorporating the culture and elements of their spirituality to weave a horror tale about the dead among the living and the consequences released by a weary soul just wanting to keep her son close a little longer, committing an act without realizing the unforeseen horrors it will bring upon her family. Unsettling scenes involving Piki’s daughter’s form taken by Oliver to lure her to her doom and Oliver’s altered presence when visualized make up some of the film’s highlights. Sisto comes and goes when the plot needs him but this is Callies’ movie. He responds to what is happening realistically, only realizing there’s truth to his wife’s insistence that Oliver had returned when Lucy (for whom he inhabits) attacks him with a knife. The sacrifice of a mother for her child is here, and the painful resistance towards letting go of a lost child remains a viable reason for why the door was opened to begin with. She needed to say goodbye and had to find a way to resolve her prevalent misery. Sisto is quite the understanding husband, and his face as Lucy stabs him rings the right note…how could a father not witness his daughter’s possession, her stabbing him without provocation, and realizing that his son’s evil spirit is trying to kill him not startle and mortify?