The House
Directed by Marc James Roels, Niki Lindroth von Bahr
- animation
- drama
- comedy
- horror
- fantasy
The story
Across different eras, a poor family, an anxious developer and a fed-up landlady become tied to the same mysterious house in this animated dark comedy.
What it’s like
Hand-built and wobbly, with the paper-and-clay texture of stop motion sitting alongside slicker 3D passages, so the frame always feels slightly handmade. The house itself is the constant: wallpaper patterns crawl, floors tilt, and rooms rearrange themselves in ways that are funny one moment and quietly alarming the next. Palettes lean on faded pastels, mustard and mossy greens for the older eras, with cold, flat interiors for the modern one. The score is playful and jaunty, full of pizzicato and clattering percussion, and the silences between scenes let the strange creak of the building come through. The mood is dark comedy with a surreal, unsettling edge, closer to a bleak fairy tale than a jump-scare horror. Pacing is brisk and episodic, with each era getting its own tone and its own warped sense of domestic life. Violence and grotesquerie appear in bursts, including messy, cruel moments and body-horror imagery, but there is no sustained gore and little that is graphic for long. Sexual content is minimal. It suits a late-night watch with friends, or anyone who likes odd, morbid humour and handmade animation, and it will frustrate viewers who want something gentle or warm throughout.
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