Looking for a fresh start and a break from the bustle of New York City, married couple Dana (Kate Beckinsale) and David (Mel Raido, doing maybe the worst Brooklyn accent in cinema history) move to a dilapidated rural mansion with their young son Lucas (Duncan Joiner). Dana was once a high-powered architect in the city, but she's been on extended leave from the firm she founded ever since the death of their infant daughter. She soon discovers that the decaying estate has a creepy locked room hidden in the attic, one that doesn't appear on any blueprints.
Dana becomes obsessed with the room, and digs deep into a box labelled "Historical Research" that the couple brought with them to the new house (probably should've done that before uprooting your young family to a potentially haunted mansion). A conversation with a local historian reveals that the chamber is a "disappointment room," a place built by well-to-do families where they could hide deformed children in order to shield them from public embarrassment. Meanwhile, night terrors and strange visions of the manor's original owner (Gerald McRaney) haunt Dana, whose grief over her lost infant continues to grow in intensity.
These two plot threads are somehow connected, but the filmmakers don't really bother to explain how or why. Instead, the movie pivots to Dana's increasingly poor mental health, almost entirely throwing out the haunted-house ghost story it spent the first half trying to establish. It leans hard on "mentally ill" stereotypes ("Are you taking your medication?"; "Please don't get sick again mommy!"), eventually building up to a full-on collapse in which Dana, shockingly, resorts to a hidden bottle of vodka. There's even a scene of pills being flushed down the toilet. Revolutionary stuff.
Director D.J. Caruso's completely unremarkable attempt at a psychological-horror flick is a mixed bag of clichés and loose ends. He co-wrote the script with Wentworth Miller, with each seemingly bringing half of a movie to the table and hoping they could jam them together to make a complete story. Not a whole lot makes sense here, and as Dana loses her grip on reality, you'll lose your interest in this paint-by-number film -- not even the occasional jump scare can justify calling it a "horror thriller." The Disappointments Room languished in limbo for more than a year while Relativity Media went through bankruptcy proceedings; it's a shame that it wasn't shelved altogether.