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What does a crossover between Tim Burton and Wes Anderson look like? The answer lies in The House. Netflix's recent stop-motion anthology brings viewers three unsettling horror stories told in soft tones that make one almost revel in the visual pleasure of shades of pastel amidst some horrific tellings.
There is a common premise that runs through all three stories - 'home' and the creeping sense of horror as life within it gets disrupted. What happens when chaos enters one's place of solace? The directors of the adult anthology have done a great job in bringing us answers for the same.
Warning: This article contains major spoilers!
Review and verdict of 'The House'
The stop-motion feature contains three stories about the same house but in different timelines. The first two episodes have a nightmarish ending, but the last one, set in a dystopian backdrop, is a ray of optimism with which to end the film.
Paying back
The first story opens with an impoverished family lured into moving to a grand house specifically curated for them by an unknown architect. Built on a nearby hilltop and fully furnished with every modern convenience, everything seemed too good to be true.
What price will the house exact from the unsuspecting family? Apparently, their lives.
Lured in by the grandiose, the parents are quickly possessed by the spirit of the house, controlled by the ominous architect. However, their two young daughters remain unaffected. The malevolent house keeps transforming itself into a maze-like pattern so that the daughters cannot reach their entranced parents, and by the time they do, it’s too late.
By the end, the parents transform into furnishings to cater to the whims of the architect and his vision of the house. In the last scene, the parents urge the children to save themselves as the raging fire around them consumes them.
There is nothing innovative about the storyline of this episode. The directors wove together the story from the usual tropes of ignorant and enchanted parents, suspecting and unheard children, and a home that reminds one of The Haunting of Hill House.
However, the overall warm aesthetics of the episode are worth a special mention. The characters are figured as rag dolls that effectively convey the metaphor of exercising control.
Acceptance
Fast forward to modern times, the house is being renovated by a desperate developer who must try to attract further investment and also repel an invasion of fur beetles. In this story, the characters are anthropomorphic, or more precisely, rats.
The developer's troubles grow manifold when a pair of potential buyers, who came to check out the house, refuse to leave. A host of other friends and relatives soon join them, and the developer desperately tries to get rid of the unwanted visitors.
Eventually, the rat family welcomes the developer as one of their own, and the final scenes reveal that the developer lost his sense of self and purpose. He joins the host of rats in demolishing the well-furnished house from the inside.
Devoid of any specific scene of horror, this second episode is morbid at best. In the last scene, the anthropomorphized characters finally make sense. The developer, who had been trying to manage the fur beetle infestation on his property and failing miserably, accepted his true self when he joined his newfound family in infesting and destroying the house.
Letting go
The last story is set in a dystopian future where the owner is engaged in a futile battle to restore the house as flood waters keep rising around her. Rosa, the owner, is obsessed with her house. She is always engaged in restoring and renovating, almost ignoring the fact that with every passing day, the rising water levels posed increasing danger.
Rosa has two tenants who pay her rent with unacceptable 'currencies' like fish and crystals, but Rosa is sure that she will get better tenants when she finally finishes the renovation. Her tenants try to help her move on, but she refuses to cave in to reality.
Finally, Rosa learns to let go when things get out of hand, but she doesn’t have to let go of her beloved house. The despotic story has an optimistic ending, which is a welcome relief from the morbid turns the first two stories took.
An unsettling feeling runs throughout the movie, amplified by the medium of stop-motion, which adds to the eeriness of the entire plot. The creators must be applauded for combining stop motion and horror in a unique manner.
A common thread runs throughout the film - a house and its tendency to attract the desperate. In every story, we see the residents unnaturally drawn and obsessed with the house, so much so that it ultimately consumes them.
Catch the latest stop-motion horror on Netflix.
