What Happened Downstairs?
2021 · 16m · United States
Directed by Andrew Nisinson
Genres: comedy, horror, mystery
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, tense
A couple in a haunted Airbnb can never remember what happens downstairs; they must stop bickering and work together to solve the haunting and escape.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The amnesia-loop gimmick should feel precious, but Nisinson leans into the absurdist friction between couple dynamics and cosmic dread in a way that actually *earns* the premise—it's not trying to be clever, it's trying to be uncomfortable, which is rarer.
A competent genre exercise that sits somewhere between *Cabin Fever* chaos and *Twilight Zone* constraint; the editing rhythms keep the escalation precise, though the film stays within well-established haunted-house grammar without meaningfully interrogating it.
The genius move is the *sound design* during the memory gaps—what we hear but don't see becomes the real horror, and that single choice carries the whole thing; most filmmakers would've cut to exposition, but Nisinson lets audio dread do the work on a shoestring.