Nothing but a collection of bricks
Netflix may be emblematic of the accelerating death of culture and the transformation of motion pictures from one of modern society's dominant art forms into an endless churn of impersonal "content", but every now and then they use their powers for good. To wit: the new three-part anthology film The House, in which four terrific stop-motion animation directors (two solo directors and one duo) have been given a pretty free hand to do what they will, with more resources, a longer running time, and guaranteed visibility beyond what those directors have customarily enjoyed. In each case, the director provided a story to playwright Enda Walsh, who then turned them into screenplays, thereby providing a vague sense of a unified voice across the whole feature. But Walsh clearly hasn't forced too much of himself onto the material; each third feels extremely distinct from the other two, enough so that the Netflix-approved logline (three stories set in the same strange house at three different time periods) almost seems like a willfully misleading attempt to put some "meaning" onto the whole film that isn't there. Some anthologies feel like perfectly-assembled puzzles, while some feel like unrelated shorts run end-to-end; The House, I think feels like three unrelated shorts run end-to-end.
But, to be very clear, they are such good shorts. So good that I can't even do the thing you do in talking about anthology films, and airily declare that one is so much better or so much worse than the others. There was something about each third of The House that I liked best out all of them; that's a pretty great feeling to take away from an anthology film.
The first segment - they don't precisely have titles, just Roman numerals, but they do have epigraphs, so let's call this "And heard within, a lie is spun" - was the one I was most excited to see, on the grounds that I have to this point had exclusively positive experiences with co-directors Emma de Swaef & Marc James Roels. To be clear, there aren't many experiences to have: their shared filmography to date consists solely of the 2012 short Oh Willy and the 2018 This Magnificent Cake!, which at 44 minutes is neither "short" nor "feature", but is in any case a masterpiece, a God-damned masterpiece. Both of those films, and their third of The House, all use essentially the same aesthetic: their animation puppets are handcrafted of wool and felt, making them look uncommonly like old-timey dolls waking up and having adventures in charmingly handicrafted worlds, which make it all the more horrifying when the toys find themselves in the midst of bleak, viciously adult settings.
It's a gorgeous aesthetic, but perhaps a limited one, and if I am being honest, there's nothing they're up to here that isn't mostly identical to what they were up to in This Magnificent Cake!, where it was all done better. Still, the story they're telling is a wonderfully stark little fable of human vanity and self-deception: Raymond (Matthew Goode) is a financial failure, in what appears to be Victorian England, and his failure is bringing down his wife Penelope (Claudie Blakley), daughter Mabel (Mia Goth), and newborn baby Isabel with him. Then one day, the family is given a peculiar offer by the mysterious Mr. Van Schoonbeek, through the person of his employee, Mr. Thomas (Mark Heap): a beautiful new home, fully appointed with furniture, free of charge. Both adults are ecstatic at the move, but Mabel has reservations: the place feels weirdly unlivable, and her parents immediately start to get so excited about the decor and physical trappings of the place that they begin to lose sight of their own value as people.
It's you're basic "don't make a deal with the devil" story, spiked with the theme omnipresent in The House: don't get so wrapped up in having "a nice house" that you forget the purpose of a house is to have a warm, comfortable place for you and the ones you love to spend time together. Nothing radical here, nor is the angle of idiot parents losing themselves to the darkness while their much sharper child looks on, alarmed. But it's all still incredibly watchable and involving, largely because of the atmosphere created. Some of this is simply because of those felt puppets, making the whole thing feel like a perverse corruption of a dollhouse. Some of it is that Malcolm Hadley, the cinematographer for this segment, is simply shameless in his use of gloomy underlighting. This is a murky film, wallowing in dark places suffused with a pervasive sense of wrongness: like the other pieces of The House, this isn't "scary", but it's unmitigated horror even so, with the depths of the house promising to devour Mabel, and her powerlessness, beautifully expressed through the puppet's fuzzy features, becomes the source of the terror.
Initially the second segment, "Then lost is truth that can't be won", seems much breezier. A real estate developer voiced by Jarvis Cocker (who also sings the film's mordant end credits theme) is trying to make a house he's just finished remodeling perfect for a showing, but he's kind of a fuckup, the construction was rushed and underfunded, and there are all sorts of nasty beetles that he attacks with ferocious chemical warfare. Also, he's an anthropomorphic rat, which at first seems like just a frippery, but by the time we get to the end, it will have become quite resonant in quite a horrible, uncomfortable way.
Still, most of the segment plays out with deadpan comedy. This is familiar territory for director Niki Lindroth von Bahr, who I would imagine is the best-known of the directors, mostly on the basis of her 2017 short The Burden; her work is characterised by stories of unrelentingly quotidian narratives made weird and uncomfortable by enacting them with anthropomorphic animal puppets. They're darkly funny and bitter, depicting social awkwardness and existential doubt through the uncomfortable body language of her shockingly expressive animal figures, and that's exactly the mode she's operating in here. But I do think her contribution to The House is a bit lighter than her earlier work; possibly this is an illusion that results from coming right on the heels of the very gloomy first segment.
At any rate, it doesn't last; at a certain point, the developer's plans are derailed by a pair of desperately off-putting figures in weird trenchcoats, and the story shifts, firmly and smoothly, into warped Kafkaesque absurdism, bizarre activity stripped of humor. And then it makes another shift into the most unnerving material in all of The House, an apocalyptic collapse of humanity into the feral existence of filthy vermin. And these two sequences are where everything pays off, including the anthropomorphic rats who make up the film; the nightmarish potency of the climax is hard to imagine without the layers of alienation packed onto the story by its aesthetic.
Things wrap up with a mood piece that's not nearly so grim as the first two: "Listen again and seek the sun". The house is now on the shores of a huge body of water, and indeed its lowest levels have already begun to feel water damage; apparently everything is steadily sinking, and the the world appears to be more or less at its end. And the thick fog separating the house from the rest of the cosmos makes "the end of the world" feel physical as well as metaphysical. Here, a short-tempered anthropomorphic cat named Rosa (Susana Wokoma) is hellbent on turning the place into a nice apartment complex, but it's falling apart, and her only tenants are a shy fisherman, Elias (Will Sharpe) who only pays in fish, and a middle-aged hippie, Jen (Helena Bonham Carter), who only pays in good vibes. They're also cats, to be clear.
Every segment of The House feels very much like a dream, with the spatial inconsistency and slippery narrative progression thereof, but this third segment is the one that most aggressively feels like nothing else. The house, the waters, the fog, what happens at the end of the story; this is all vague and only semi-coherent, in a way that feels so close to making sense while you're working through it. If the first two thirds of the film are horrible nightmares, this one is... still a nightmare, but the kind you wake up from thinking "oof, that was fucked up", but it's not that you're terrified or on an adrenaline jag, more that you were briefly inhabiting a very different world that wouldn't be very nice to life in, but it's also somehow exciting to think of going back there the next time you fall asleep.
This segment was directed by Paloma Baeza, the only one of the filmmakers I hadn't heard of before this; she turns out to be extremely good at her job. The dreaminess is present in every element of the visuals and narrative, but one of the things that really sells it is the uncanniness. The humanoid cats moving around here are remarkably expressive and fluid, far beyond what a relatively low-budget stop-motion film ought to be able to achieve; the result is a combination of the engaging tactility of this medium and the more elegant fluidity of hand-drawn animation that makes it feel not just uncanny in the way that stop-motion animation already is, but even more uncanny because of how much it feels like the kind of stop-motion animation that can only exist in some reality not quite our own. Privilege of place probably has something to do with it, but I've been thinking more about this last third than the other two combined since I saw the film. Does that mean it's the best? The weirdest? Is it just that I didn't know what to expect from Baeza, so it struck me as the most novel?
Ultimately, it doesn't matter. Each third of The House succeeds in its own style, on its own terms. Cumulatively, they create an extraordinary mood of waking nightmares and foolish humanity crafting its own demise. This is a boutique product for a self-selecting audience, but it's also some of the most striking animation, all bundled together, that I've seen in a long time. I virtually never feel grateful for Netflix's robotic stranglehold on all of our televisions, but in this case, it is so gratifying that I get to nudge you all towards this one: it's a pretty singular experience, and to think that it's just sitting there, part of the endless churn of streaming Stuff. Well, pointing these things out is the mission of the film reviewer, I guess.
But, to be very clear, they are such good shorts. So good that I can't even do the thing you do in talking about anthology films, and airily declare that one is so much better or so much worse than the others. There was something about each third of The House that I liked best out all of them; that's a pretty great feeling to take away from an anthology film.
The first segment - they don't precisely have titles, just Roman numerals, but they do have epigraphs, so let's call this "And heard within, a lie is spun" - was the one I was most excited to see, on the grounds that I have to this point had exclusively positive experiences with co-directors Emma de Swaef & Marc James Roels. To be clear, there aren't many experiences to have: their shared filmography to date consists solely of the 2012 short Oh Willy and the 2018 This Magnificent Cake!, which at 44 minutes is neither "short" nor "feature", but is in any case a masterpiece, a God-damned masterpiece. Both of those films, and their third of The House, all use essentially the same aesthetic: their animation puppets are handcrafted of wool and felt, making them look uncommonly like old-timey dolls waking up and having adventures in charmingly handicrafted worlds, which make it all the more horrifying when the toys find themselves in the midst of bleak, viciously adult settings.
It's a gorgeous aesthetic, but perhaps a limited one, and if I am being honest, there's nothing they're up to here that isn't mostly identical to what they were up to in This Magnificent Cake!, where it was all done better. Still, the story they're telling is a wonderfully stark little fable of human vanity and self-deception: Raymond (Matthew Goode) is a financial failure, in what appears to be Victorian England, and his failure is bringing down his wife Penelope (Claudie Blakley), daughter Mabel (Mia Goth), and newborn baby Isabel with him. Then one day, the family is given a peculiar offer by the mysterious Mr. Van Schoonbeek, through the person of his employee, Mr. Thomas (Mark Heap): a beautiful new home, fully appointed with furniture, free of charge. Both adults are ecstatic at the move, but Mabel has reservations: the place feels weirdly unlivable, and her parents immediately start to get so excited about the decor and physical trappings of the place that they begin to lose sight of their own value as people.
It's you're basic "don't make a deal with the devil" story, spiked with the theme omnipresent in The House: don't get so wrapped up in having "a nice house" that you forget the purpose of a house is to have a warm, comfortable place for you and the ones you love to spend time together. Nothing radical here, nor is the angle of idiot parents losing themselves to the darkness while their much sharper child looks on, alarmed. But it's all still incredibly watchable and involving, largely because of the atmosphere created. Some of this is simply because of those felt puppets, making the whole thing feel like a perverse corruption of a dollhouse. Some of it is that Malcolm Hadley, the cinematographer for this segment, is simply shameless in his use of gloomy underlighting. This is a murky film, wallowing in dark places suffused with a pervasive sense of wrongness: like the other pieces of The House, this isn't "scary", but it's unmitigated horror even so, with the depths of the house promising to devour Mabel, and her powerlessness, beautifully expressed through the puppet's fuzzy features, becomes the source of the terror.
Initially the second segment, "Then lost is truth that can't be won", seems much breezier. A real estate developer voiced by Jarvis Cocker (who also sings the film's mordant end credits theme) is trying to make a house he's just finished remodeling perfect for a showing, but he's kind of a fuckup, the construction was rushed and underfunded, and there are all sorts of nasty beetles that he attacks with ferocious chemical warfare. Also, he's an anthropomorphic rat, which at first seems like just a frippery, but by the time we get to the end, it will have become quite resonant in quite a horrible, uncomfortable way.
Still, most of the segment plays out with deadpan comedy. This is familiar territory for director Niki Lindroth von Bahr, who I would imagine is the best-known of the directors, mostly on the basis of her 2017 short The Burden; her work is characterised by stories of unrelentingly quotidian narratives made weird and uncomfortable by enacting them with anthropomorphic animal puppets. They're darkly funny and bitter, depicting social awkwardness and existential doubt through the uncomfortable body language of her shockingly expressive animal figures, and that's exactly the mode she's operating in here. But I do think her contribution to The House is a bit lighter than her earlier work; possibly this is an illusion that results from coming right on the heels of the very gloomy first segment.
At any rate, it doesn't last; at a certain point, the developer's plans are derailed by a pair of desperately off-putting figures in weird trenchcoats, and the story shifts, firmly and smoothly, into warped Kafkaesque absurdism, bizarre activity stripped of humor. And then it makes another shift into the most unnerving material in all of The House, an apocalyptic collapse of humanity into the feral existence of filthy vermin. And these two sequences are where everything pays off, including the anthropomorphic rats who make up the film; the nightmarish potency of the climax is hard to imagine without the layers of alienation packed onto the story by its aesthetic.
Things wrap up with a mood piece that's not nearly so grim as the first two: "Listen again and seek the sun". The house is now on the shores of a huge body of water, and indeed its lowest levels have already begun to feel water damage; apparently everything is steadily sinking, and the the world appears to be more or less at its end. And the thick fog separating the house from the rest of the cosmos makes "the end of the world" feel physical as well as metaphysical. Here, a short-tempered anthropomorphic cat named Rosa (Susana Wokoma) is hellbent on turning the place into a nice apartment complex, but it's falling apart, and her only tenants are a shy fisherman, Elias (Will Sharpe) who only pays in fish, and a middle-aged hippie, Jen (Helena Bonham Carter), who only pays in good vibes. They're also cats, to be clear.
Every segment of The House feels very much like a dream, with the spatial inconsistency and slippery narrative progression thereof, but this third segment is the one that most aggressively feels like nothing else. The house, the waters, the fog, what happens at the end of the story; this is all vague and only semi-coherent, in a way that feels so close to making sense while you're working through it. If the first two thirds of the film are horrible nightmares, this one is... still a nightmare, but the kind you wake up from thinking "oof, that was fucked up", but it's not that you're terrified or on an adrenaline jag, more that you were briefly inhabiting a very different world that wouldn't be very nice to life in, but it's also somehow exciting to think of going back there the next time you fall asleep.
This segment was directed by Paloma Baeza, the only one of the filmmakers I hadn't heard of before this; she turns out to be extremely good at her job. The dreaminess is present in every element of the visuals and narrative, but one of the things that really sells it is the uncanniness. The humanoid cats moving around here are remarkably expressive and fluid, far beyond what a relatively low-budget stop-motion film ought to be able to achieve; the result is a combination of the engaging tactility of this medium and the more elegant fluidity of hand-drawn animation that makes it feel not just uncanny in the way that stop-motion animation already is, but even more uncanny because of how much it feels like the kind of stop-motion animation that can only exist in some reality not quite our own. Privilege of place probably has something to do with it, but I've been thinking more about this last third than the other two combined since I saw the film. Does that mean it's the best? The weirdest? Is it just that I didn't know what to expect from Baeza, so it struck me as the most novel?
Ultimately, it doesn't matter. Each third of The House succeeds in its own style, on its own terms. Cumulatively, they create an extraordinary mood of waking nightmares and foolish humanity crafting its own demise. This is a boutique product for a self-selecting audience, but it's also some of the most striking animation, all bundled together, that I've seen in a long time. I virtually never feel grateful for Netflix's robotic stranglehold on all of our televisions, but in this case, it is so gratifying that I get to nudge you all towards this one: it's a pretty singular experience, and to think that it's just sitting there, part of the endless churn of streaming Stuff. Well, pointing these things out is the mission of the film reviewer, I guess.
