The House (2022 film)

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The House
The House (2022 film).jpeg
Official release poster
Directed by
Written byEnda Walsh
Story byEmma de Swaef
Marc James Roels
Niki Lindroth von Bahr
Johannes Nyholm
Paloma Baeza
Produced by
  • Charlotte Bavasso
  • Christopher O'Reilly
Starring
Cinematography
  • James Lewis
  • Malcolm Hadley
Edited byBarney Pilling
Music byGustavo Santaolalla
Production
companies
Distributed byNetflix
Release date
  • January 14, 2022 (2022-01-14)
Running time
97 minutes
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish

The House is a 2022 British adult stop-motion animated anthology film written by Enda Walsh and telling three different stories spanning different worlds and characters, but all set inside the same house.

Originally announced as a TV series, it became an anthology film. Produced for Netflix by Nexus Studios in London, it tells three stories respectively directed by the duo of Emma de Swaef and Marc James Roels, Niki Lindroth von Bahr, and Paloma Baeza as their directorial debuts; the directors are credited for the story of their respective segments, with Johannes Nyholm as co-writer for the second.

Plot[]

I - And heard within, a lie is spun[]

Mabel, a young girl, lives with her father Raymond, mother Penny, and newborn sister Isobel in relative poverty. Drunk and irritated by feelings of failure after a visit from wealthy and stuck-up relatives, Raymond encounters the mysterious architect Mr. Van Schoonbeek in the forest one night, and accepts Van Schoonbeek's offer to move into a new luxurious house built for them at no charge.

After the family moves in, Mabel notices several peculiar things about the house and the workers constantly refitting it, but her parents seem mesmerized by the house and its luxuries to notice anything else. As time passes, Raymond becomes increasingly obsessed with the house's fireplace, which he constantly fails to light up while Penny spends more and more time sewing the drapes (to the point of collapsing many times); Mabel alone seems to notice how the house's layout keeps on changing nonsensically as she and her sister seem to be the only ones remaining sane. Mabel also becomes further put off when her parents soon begin donning attire designed by Van Schoonbeek which resembles the furniture they adore (a chair and curtains).

Exploring the house one night, Mabel and Isobel find themselves lost in the maze it has become, and are unable to return to their parents; eventually stumbling upon Van Schoonbeek's employee Mr. Thomas. Thomas confesses with guilt that he is simply an actor following a script provided by Van Schoonbeek as he has been the middleman between his boss and the girls' parents. Meanwhile, by a suggestion from Thomas a little earlier, Raymond is finally able to light a fire by using the family's old possessions (the last of which being Mabel's beloved dollhouse) as burning material while being transfixed by the roaring flames. When the sisters finally reunite with their parents, they find Raymond and Penny turned into furniture; Raymond into a chair in front of the fireplace and Penny into curtains. As the fireplace's fire expands and sets the room on fire, the parents seemingly awaken from their trance and desperately urge their daughters to escape. Having escaped while their parents burned alive, the sisters Mabel and Isobel watch the smoking house from a distance as the sun rises behind it, leaving their fate unknown.

II - Then lost is truth that can't be won[]

The story is set in a world populated by anthropomorphic rats, and the house featured in the first story is now settled in a developed city street and is about to go up for sale. The developer working on renovating the house is struggling financially, and his financial future depends on the house's sale. He recently laid off his construction crew in order to reduce costs, and must therefore do all the work himself. He soon discovers the house has been infested by Fur beetles and larvae, and takes increasingly extreme measures to get rid of them, to no avail.

On the day of the viewing, the guests are unimpressed by the house; although the viewing ends in complete disaster, a strangely-shaped couple remain and express a strong interest in buying the house. Unwilling to risk the sale by not obliging the couple's strange behavior, the developer lets them stay the night. Over the next few days, the odd couple remain firmly settled in the house, the bugs return in force, and the bank keeps demanding repayment of the developer's business loan. The developer decides to stop indulging the couple, whose bodies are revealed to have the shapes of a beetle and larva respectively, only for many members of the couple's family to show up wanting to enter the house.

At his wit's end, the developer snaps and threatens to kill the couple with boric acid, but he ends up inhaling a mouthful and fainting. The developer survives, but is reduced to a seemingly catatonic state. The odd couple eventually picks the developer up from the hospital and brings him home, where the couple's entire family throws him a welcome back party, many of them now sporting additional limbs similar to the bugs'. The final scene shows the family ravaging the inside of the house, climbing up the walls and chewing through everything like bugs. The developer, having regressed to animal-like intelligence, briefly emerges from the remains of the oven to eat garbage before retreating back through the broken oven to a hole in the wall which leads into the underground.

III - Listen again and seek the sun[]

In a world which seemingly suffered an apocalyptic flood and is populated by anthropomorphic cats, the house is surrounded by water which keeps on rising. Rosa, the landlord who cherishes the memories of her days growing up in the house, dreams of restoring it to its former glory. However, she struggles financially and her friends and only two tenants, fisherman Elias and hippie Jen, do not pay rent despite her insistence, limiting Rosa's ability to fix the house, which suffers frequent malfunctions; she consistently ignores her friends' attempts to address the rising water.

When Jen's "spirit partner" Cosmos, a craftsman, arrives to visit, Rosa enlists him to work on the house, but is infuriated to find out he has been tearing up the house's floorboards to build a boat for Elias instead. As Cosmos continues to refit the house against Rosa's wishes, Rosa argues with Elias, hurt that he wishes to leave, while he accuses her of being afraid to do the same. He later departs on the makeshift boat, much to her chagrin.

As the water and mist continues to seep into the house and Jen prepares to leave the house with Cosmos, she puts Rosa into a dream-like trance, in which she sees the house destroyed and her friends abandoning her. Emerging from the vision, she sees Jen and Cosmos sailing away, calling for her to join them, but the boat is too far away. Remembering a strange giant lever Cosmos had built in front of the house for her, she pushes it, transforming the house into a seaworthy vessel. Encouraged by Jen, Cosmos, and a returning Elias, Rosa takes control of the house ship, escaping as the floods destroy the surrounding foundations, and the four sail out into the ocean, making this story of the three in the film separately, the only one to have a perfect ending.

Voice cast[]

I - And heard within, a lie is spun
II - Then lost is truth that can't be won
III - Listen again and seek the sun

Production[]

The House was first announced in January 2020, with the anthology being produced at the London unit of Nexus Studios for Netflix. Nexus had three director teams lined up to tell a tale of three distinct family generations at the same house: [1] The duo of Emma de Swaef and Marc James Roels, Niki Lindroth von Bahr, and Paloma Baeza; the directors are credited for the story of their respective segments, with Johannes Nyholm as co-writer for the second. At the 2021 Annecy Film Festival in June, the key voice cast was announced for each story.[2] In November 2021, the first images of the anthology were revealed along with the release date of 14 January 2022.[3] The first trailer was released in December 2021.[4][5]

Nicolas Ménard and Manshen Lo co-created the hand-drawn, 2D animated title sequence.[6]

The project had originated at a meeting at producer Charlotte Bavasso's London home, where the four directors "brainstormed a bit and came up with this idea about a house in which different things are happening in different times. We agreed that we would each have our own separate chapter, but still with connections to each other," according to von Bahr. Later, "We chatted a lot over Zoom and helped each other with script development and character design, everything. All of us were quite new to such an upscale project, so I think this was a perfect arrangement. You had your own film, but you didn't feel alone."[7] Bavasso, said Baeza, "brought us together and we talked about stories and characters that we were interested in, and we tried to find overlaps, which is a completely unique experience. You never get to work with filmmakers or creatives in that collaborative way where you are each doing a separate film, but also sharing lots of ideas."[8] The directors wrote detailed story outlines, and then Irish playwright Enda Walsh wrote all three segments' dialog in collaboration with them.[9]

Roels said his and Swaef's opening segment came from the desire to tell "the story of the house before there was a house, the origin story, so to speak. I had been reading a graphic novel by Richard McGuire called Here, in which you see a corner of the world and how it changes through millennia. You see it as farmland, and when it was inhabited by Native Americans, and before that when there were dinosaurs. And then suddenly you’re in the 1950s and someone's vacuuming the floor. And it kind of sparked off an idea, like what was there before the house?"[10]

Each of the three segments required more than 20 weeks to produce.[9] Except for the Busby Berkeley style dance number in the second segment and the mist and some water effects in the third segment, almost all the animation was done "in camera" without greenscreen or digital compositing.[9]

Reception[]

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 97% of 29 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 7.40/10. The website's consensus reads, "Whether you're a fan of stop-motion animation or just looking for something deeply, alluringly weird, The House will feel like home."[11]

Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 71 out of 100 based on 10 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[12]

Dmitry Samarov of the Chicago Reader said the movie "sustains its momentum by varying the styles of storytelling and rarely stooping to either crassness or cutesiness. … Each story is directed by different people with obviously separate ideas and inspirations; this heterogeneity moves the film along without ever letting it overstay its welcome. Yet the unifying elements of setting and the charmingly old-fashioned stop-motion animation keep it from flying off in a million directions."[13]

Lucy Mangan in The Guardian gave the movie 3 out of 5 stars. She said the first segment is "by far the most successful of the trio," and that the second was "too underbaked to deliver any real horrors or work as a fable about violation, or capitalism or any of the other themes it seems at various moments to be nodding vaguely at." She said the third was "a very, very slight affair," and that overall, "If the content of the stories had matched the painstaking form, the anthology could have been rather a groundbreaking success."[14] But Noel Murray of The AV Club said of that second segment that, "All of The House is worth watching—especially for animation buffs—but for those who can handle a hefty helping of grotesquerie, von Bahr's segment is the one can't-miss."[15]

Nick Allen at RogerEbert.com said, "With its rising directors each employing a surreal style, it creates a rich balance of ethereal, existential storytelling with stop-motion animation that’s so detailed and alive you can practically feel it on your fingertips," and that it "proves to be a consistent anthology, in that it’s always just about the same level of surreal, playful, sadistic, and entertaining."[16]

References[]

  1. ^ White, Peter (15 January 2020). "Netflix Orders Dark Animated Comedy The House From Animation Firm Nexus Studios". Deadline Hollywood. Penske Media Corporation.
  2. ^ Giardina, Carolyn (14 June 2021). "Helena Bonham Carter Joins Voice Cast of Netflix's The House". The Hollywood Reporter. PMRC.
  3. ^ Dudok de Wit, Alex (26 November 2021). "Netflix's Stop-Motion Project The House Gets First Images, Release Date". Cartoon Brew.
  4. ^ Templeton, Molly (17 December 2021). "Do Not Go Into Netflix's The House Alone". Tor.com.
  5. ^ Carter, Justin. "Netflix's The House Offers Up Stop Motion Scares". Gizmodo.
  6. ^ Sarto, Debbie Diamond (15 February 2022). "Nexus Studios Creates Opening Sequence for Netflix's 'The House'". Animation World Network. Retrieved 8 March 2022.
  7. ^ Hofferman, Jon (18 January 2022). "The Surreal, Stop-Motion World of 'The House,' Part 2". Animation World Network. Retrieved 8 March 2022.
  8. ^ Sarto, Dan; Hofferman, Jon (18 January 2022). "The Surreal, Stop-Motion World of 'The House,' Part 3". Animation World Network. Retrieved 8 March 2022.
  9. ^ a b c Wolff, Ellen (February 2022). "Tactile Trilogy: A Tour of the Netflix/Nexus Stop-Motion Anthology 'The House'". Animation Magazine. No. 317. Retrieved 8 March 2022.
  10. ^ Sarto, Dan; Hofferman, Jon (18 January 2022). "The Surreal, Stop-Motion World of 'The House,' Part 1". Animation World Network. Retrieved 8 March 2022.
  11. ^ "The House". Rotten Tomatoes. Fandango Media. Retrieved 4 February 2022.
  12. ^ "The House". Metacritic. Red Ventures. Retrieved 20 January 2022.
  13. ^ https://chicagoreader.com/film/the-house-netflix/%7Ctitle=The House|first=Dmitry|last=Samarov|date=February 11, 2022|work=Chicago Reader|access-date=March 8, 2022}}
  14. ^ Mangan, Lucy (13 January 2022). "The House review – beautiful animation that speaks to your darkest terrors". The Guardian. Retrieved 8 March 2022.
  15. ^ Murray, Noel (12 January 2022). "Modern stop-motion animation masters collaborate on Netflix's creepy anthology film 'The House'". The AV Club. Retrieved 8 March 2022.
  16. ^ Allen, Nick (14 January 2022). "The House". RogerEbert.com. Retrieved 8 March 2022.

External links[]

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