THE OTHER SIDE OF THE DOOR

Directed by: Johannes Robert

Starring by: Sarah Wayne Callies, Jeremy Sisto, Javier Botet, Sofia Rosinsky

Kiti Production

Looks like Hollywood is searching horror in Asia this year, after The Forest released in January which taking Urban Legend from Japan, The Other Side of The Door took place at India and also taking the myth of Sacred Temple inside the forest of South India which known as a place of intersection of reality and supernatural world.

Like The Forest, this film also started by nightmare of the main character, Maria. She’s dreaming of a little girl that turned to demonic form while walking on the coast with her husband, Michael. And it turned out to be a night mare of six year past which made us wonders why suddenly she punch Michael who sleep next to her and sob hysterically.

After that the film delivered several early scenes to describe the lost of Maria when tragic accident happened to her and her kids at car drowning, taking the live of her old son Oliver but on the other hand she and Lucy, her daughter, survived. Guilt and sadness covers Maria so deeply and made her almost killed herself when she took lots of sleeping pills by coincidence.

Piki, the maid who worked in Michael family felt sorry and told Maria about sacred temple in South India. The temple is some kind of intersection of the world of the dead and the living so they could meet each other behind the close door. 

Piki thought if Maria could talk to her son Oliver, at least once, in order to say sorry and good bye then it will be better for Maria. Maria agreed to do that and after she cremates Oliver’s corpse, she took his ashes to the temple and stay there for a night.

What Piki said is right, the spirit of Oliver comes that night and talk to Maria, but she ignores Piki’s warned not to open the temple’s door when the spirit of Oliver’s been talking to her. That ignorance connected the spirit to leap into the reality world and Maria fund out that Oliver’s spirit is haunting their house after she came back from the temple.

I think it’s nice to see the slight change from delightful spirit of Oliver to annoying ghost, very terrifying, and I think most of the audience in that cinema agrees with me that the same condition would easily change to different perspective after you realized the motivation.

I’m talking about how happy Maria was when she can do the same activity that she used to do when Oliver was alive, sitting on the chair next to his bed and read the story book of Jungle Boy. It’s awesome to see the effect when the lights went on, the chair pulled by itself next to the bed, and the book fall from the shelf. But on the next moment, it became unpleasant when the spirit forced her to do so after Maria rebuke Oliver not to bite Lucy.

Since then the evil spirit haunt Maria’s house. The plants went dry, the fishes and the birds dead, and many weird men followed her everywhere. Piki realized Maria must be the cause of all of these, she must be open the forbidden door, and to release the problems they should collected Oliver’s property, which linking the spirit to the mortal world, and burns it permanently. Too bad, before she’s able to finish the task, Oliver is able to kill her first.

The burden is on Maria now. Does she succeed to get rid of the evil spirit of Oliver?  Well, I think it will be appropriate if you watched this movie by yourself. Beside you can’t find the review elsewhere because the Wiki only gave you less, it said that this film originally scheduled to be released on 26 Feb 2016 but it was pushed back to 4^th March 2016 in UK. Strangely it was released on 26 Feb here in Indonesia – I don’t know how could that happened – but I think it was nice because I think this is first time for us, Indonesian people, to see a film before the global people does.  

Well, my suggestion for the audience in UK, I think you should checked why the leaves still green at the scene where Maria tried to cast out strange man on her backyard in the rain? Is it only my imagination or it might some error of continity?