After her scene-stealing turn as Deadite Ellie in Evil Dead Rise, and her surprise post-credits cameo in Evil Dead Burn, Alyssa Sutherland is back. This time she’s not the one being haunted. She’s the one doing the haunting.
The Room Below arrived on Digital and VOD on September 1, 2026, from Uncork’d Entertainment. It runs 100 minutes. Writer-director Kurt Martin (Moon Rock for Monday) helms the Australian production from Lunar Pictures, Tetrad Studios, and Hooligan Dreamers, with support from Screen NSW and Create NSW.
The Film
Sutherland plays Mia Levine, a grieving mother whose son has died of cancer. When a young boy named Simon (Gilbert Bradman) enters her life, Mia sees a second chance. She keeps him. As her obsession deepens, the creature hiding within her home grows increasingly difficult to control. Meanwhile, retired detective Frank Peterson (Bobby Gilchrist) begins investigating the child’s disappearance, and the trail leads directly to Mia’s door. Jonathan Rhys Meyers plays John Perkins, a figure from Mia’s past whose brief presence adds a layer of genuine unease to the story. Goran D. Kleut plays Doctor Roman, and Lauren Grimson plays Jazz.
Why Sutherland Is the Whole Film
Kevin’s Film Reviews puts it plainly: Sutherland is the best part of an uneven movie. On the surface, Mia is cheerful and charismatic, and then, with a specific inflection or a flicker of expression, she becomes something deeply wrong. The review describes her ability to switch tones in an instant as the film’s central achievement, going from a loving, devoted mother to something much darker without ever telegraphing the transition. Letterboxd viewers are more divided, some find the grief-obsession-creature combination too scattered, others are fully in for the ride, but almost everyone agrees that Sutherland herself is excellent.
The Critical Verdict
The consensus across reviews is consistent, The Room Below tries to do too much at once, part grief drama, part psychological thriller, part creature feature, part abduction mystery, and the combination is uneven. But it continuously raises its own stakes, moving from “this is weird” to “this is scary” to “this is unhinged” by the third act. For a VOD creature feature built around a single towering performance, that’s more than enough reason to watch.
The Room Below is available now on Digital and VOD.
