Of the three segments, this one is both the creepiest and the least satisfying. And that somehow ties into a different form of home infestation that the Developer has a hard time shaking. But the house is infested with hard-to-eradicate fur beetles, which have other ideas for the place. A contractor, an ambitious up-and-comer credited solely as “Developer” (and voiced by musician Jarvis Cocker), has taken out a clearly ruinous loan in order to refurbish the place as a no-expenses-spared showcase for modern luxuries, from imported marble floors to phone-integrated mood lighting. While the bones of the house and the lines of its exterior are exactly the same, it seems to be a different place entirely - an airy, spacious home located in a bustling city. In the second segment, from Swedish director Niki Lindroth von Bahr, the characters are rats. The segment feels like a child’s nightmare, with an ending to match. The house around them is more concrete and looming, and it dwarfs them and makes them feel less real as the story progresses. They look like blurry Aardman Animation characters - Wallace and Gromit, but out of focus, or as if they’d melted a bit after being left out in the rain. Unlike the characters in the other two segments, Mabel and her family are human - but they’re an unusually soft and shapeless form of human, with bulging felted faces and beady little features, all set close together. But Belgian directors Emma de Swaef and Marc James Roels tell their story with eerie, effective touches. The segment’s messaging about what makes a house into a home is simple enough, and so is the obvious horror-story progression of the plot. Their young daughter Mabel (Mia Goth) is horrified by the changes in her parents when they move into their vast new mansion, where silent workers are constantly disassembling and rebuilding everything around them, and elaborate meals appear in the dining room every night, provided by unseen hands. Shortly after that, a mysterious, eccentric architect offers to build the seething Raymond and his dubious but supportive wife Penny (Claudie Blakley) a lavish new home, on the condition that they move there and never leave. In the first of the three 30-minute segments (titled I, II, and III), a family of four living quietly in the country are thrown off-course by a visit from some hateful relatives, who sneer at the father, Raymond ( Watchmen’s Matthew Goode) for the modest ambitions that have him living in such a small, rural home. The film’s visual style is deceptively cozy, but the stories are anything but. Fox is a quaint, homey fantasy, The House heads much further into the surreal stop-motion territory of Czech artist Jan Švankmajer. Fox: The protagonists here are similar anthropomorphic animals, constructed with the same kind of softness and warmth, and sometimes operating with the same kind of anxiety-fueled chattiness. Two of The House’s three stories look like they could take place in the same world as Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. The film isn’t traditional horror, but it has deep-rooted horror elements that may creep up on viewers, just like those dancing parasites do. But it should count for something that this collection of three weird animated stories is so capable of unnerving an audience with something so gleeful and playful. After all, there isn’t much competition for that title. Maybe it isn’t saying much to note that Netflix’s stop-motion film The House features the most disturbing, skin-crawling, stomach-flipping vermin-based musical number since the 2019 CG-fest Cats.
0 kommentar(er)
