How Not To Select Your Movie
Today I watched The House, a new very black comedy made completely in stop-motion, purely on accident. I saw the film randomly showing up when browsing Netflix, and the little icon of the movie showed a cute anthropomorphic stop-motion cat and as I really like cats, I immediately clicked on it, not expecting much beyond watching cartoon cats being cute while whatever garbage story the film-makers came up with rolled around in the background.
And then instead it was about the most ugly stop-motion people ever thought up in hell getting slowly crushed mentally and physically by an evil house. What?
Yeah, so this movie is a true black comedy, like only the British have the balls to do. The entire thing oozes Britishness out of every pore, and as a poor German, I often felt like I had to be born British to understand what was going on. The House is also the creepiest, most horrifying shit I’ve seen in a very long time. I’d call it a “horror comedy”, though probably not a lot of people would remember today that horror comedies were also once supposed to be scary, not just silly. Netflix calls The House “Satire” and this moniker is apt: It’s satire in the true sense of the word, so if you don’t like having constant nightmares for the next few days, you should probably not watch this.
Oh, and if you have an insect phobia, avoid this movie. You’ve been warned.
You’re still there? Well OK then, let’s continue.
Structure
The movie is actually three short stories, allegedly all happening “in the same house”, but that’s either a metaphor only British people can understand, or true only in the sense that interdimensional horrors can probably travel between universes. Each of the short vignettes is structured the same way: Some poor fool or group of fools are tricked into becoming landlords, and have their souls then slowly and gruesomely crushed by whatever happens next.
I guess the themes of The House could be flippantly summarized as “don’t be a landlord” and “if a dead mountain of bricks becomes more important than friends and family to you, hell awaits”. There are three variants of these themes playing out across the three short stories, and the eponymous house becomes the oppressive tool of hell to beat down on our unlucky wannabe landlords.
It also builds on different ideas of what house owners are like: The first story deals with a family being crushed by mortgages, the second deals with a rich idiot completely failing to see how he wastes and destroys his own life and the third deals with a frustrated house owner who has great plans for her shitty house, but lacks the money the other two idiot morons had in spades. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. From here on, there will be spoilers!
Thumbs
The first story plays in the 19th century in what I’m blindly assuming is supposed to be our Earth. This world at least is populated with hideously monstrous thumb people (like, walking thumbs with faces ugly) and after a while you slowly realize that these things are supposed to represent humans. After the revulsion dies down a bit, you then concentrate back on the screen and learn that apparently, some rich fucker is building / has built (either the movie is not really clear on this, or I wasn’t really paying attention yet) a house in the middle of nowhere as some sort of fucked-up art statement. And now a family has bought the house and wants to move in.
After a long ordeal of suffering through the worst people Great Britain and mankind has to offer, the house has metaphorically eaten the parents and the house burns down to the ground, presumably out of sheer spite that there are still humans alive on this world. At this point I had realized I was watching real horror and not a Disney-movie, so I was really glad when the kids managed to survive. So OK, now they’ll starve to death in the icy semi-forested nightmare wasteland surrounding the house, but at least they won’t burn to death!
And that was the first story. It starts slow and creepy, and then the creepy just keeps ramping up until you stop laughing about how silly and ugly everyone looks and start to get scared.
Rats in the Belfry
The second story suddenly teleports you into a world where apparently, real humans and intelligent vermin are sharing the same world. (Either my attention span dropped a couple times again, or the movie keeps it intentionally vague if this is just basically Rat World, or if humans and intelligent rats are just sharing the same place).
But uh oh, we already had a full story about “humans” last time, so this time it’s all about the things you normally kill with poison if you find them in your house. We meet a stop-motion rat guy, some sort of semi-rich yuppie who wants to sell a house. We learn that he is really stressed about life in general, and there’s a failing relationship involved, with a partner we never get to see.
Getting someone to buy his fancy house runs into some problems along the way, like insects trying to claim the house for themselves and having to throw parties for other rich yuppies. At first, it’s literally him spraying poison everywhere like a lunatic, but as time goes on and he gets more stressed and desperate, things take on a turn for the more bizarre. Like insects masquerading as rats kind of bizarre. You know. Bizarre.
Eventually, rat boy here suffers a complete mental breakdown, a complete and utter destruction of his self. Symbolically, as his mind dies its final death, his smartphone dies too and a last attempt of his significant other to reach him fails. The phone call is left unanswered, and a completely normal, unintelligent rat rises from his hospital bed to go live together with a bunch of other vermin in the house he now not even owns. Very uplifting, if you’re an intelligent cockroach.
If You Hurt the Kitties, I will Murder You
So after two very dark, very intense stories, I was of course horrified when the third and last story started with cute kitties in yet another dimension, living their very British lives. This time, there are zero humans around, but the fucking house is of course still there, ready to destroy more lives.
At this moment, I had finally stopped doing anything besides watching the movie, and swore a blood oath to teleport behind the film makers like fucking Jason Vorhees, machete in hand, if anyone of those poor stop-motion cats was hurt in any way, shape or form. And considering how the other two stories ended, I was already preparing the goat sacrifice to gain the dark powers I needed to pull this off.
Without spoiling too much, after watching humans and rats fucking things up, we finally get catharsis, as the last wannabe-landlord is not only a cute kitten with the cutest British lady voice, but also not as braindead stupid as the other idiots, who fed their lives and families to Mammon without a second thought. She has scruples, and her friends get to keep on being her tenants, despite only being able to pay in fish and crystals instead of money.
It does get hairy of course, and as we already know the house, this third story creates an astonishingly nightmarish and oppressive feel, which only works because we got to see the other two stories first. We know things are fucked, even if the cats are just living seemingly peaceful lives as stereotypical British people. If this story was put first or second in the order, the entire movie would collapse under its own metaphorical weight like a black hole of stupid. Luckily, the film-makers also had a working brain and so you get to fret around, hoping the cat lady will escape her pre-ordained gruesome fate.
Also luckily our catty friend manages to not alienate her friends away and eventually defeats the evil house by realizing a house is just a dumb dead thing made of bricks. Defeated, the house is now a boat! But I’m still watching you, house. I’ve not forgotten. No, I have not.
Anyway, our cat lady escapes with the help of her friends. The End.
If I read this metaphor right she still owns a house now, but stopped being a landlord or something. The literal level we get to see, well, literally, is a bit too weird to fully explain in text, you will have to go and watch for yourself, I fear.
I think it’s a reference to Global Warming? Or the secret wish of every German to finally sink those damn islands? Who knows. The cats are safe, and that’s literally all I cared about in the end.
Verdict
This movie was a bit of a surprise, which I guess should be expected if you base your viewing choices on stuff like how cute you think the front cover of the DVD case looks or whatever. Still, putting the heroine of the third of three stories up, front and center was certainly a thing Netflix did.
To be honest, probably more people like cats then rats or weird thumb humans, so from a marketing perspective, it makes perfect sense. And well, it worked in my case! I wouldn’t have tried this movie otherwise. Putting the cutest animals last is a masterful stroke of psychological manipulation, boosted by making the last batch of characters also the most likable of the bunch.
Overall, the movie works. It tramples on you and keeps screaming about the futility of man into your eyes and ears until the bitter end, where you finally get to have some slight relief: It is possible, you learn, to escape the horror of capitalism, if you’re willing to leave that dumb pile of bricks behind and search for a real home instead. A lesson for the ages, but sadly one probably wasted on the kind of people who spend all their time buying and selling houses, I think.
Though if you are, indeed, a very stressed out landlady, maybe watching this movie will make you realize how shitty your life is and how much better you could do if you aren’t constantly dealing with tenants, house repairs, the housing market, and rich guys trying to make you burn your own children. A very German lesson, now that I think about it.
It’s nice to see at least some people still remember what satire is supposed to be and sadly, even here in Germany, things have gotten bad enough watching this movie really, really hurts you. The only way to get through this without feeling visceral pain is to either be a soulless monstrosity, like a landlord, or to have enough billions of buckazoids your soul was not drained, but never there in the first place.
Final verdict: 13 out of 13 hanged landlords. Viva la revolución!
Edit: Oh, Cat-harsis. I get it now. Very funny, you fuckers.
Blue Omen 