Ouh, here’s a fun little curiosity to change your mind a bit. The House, produced by UK-based Nexus Studios and streamed by Netflix, is a stop-motion anthology special for adults. Three stories of about half an hour each take place in the same house at different times. The first two have a chilling twist, the third is a simpler but dystopian tale.
In the interest of full disclosure, I’m firmly on the side of those who find stop-motion animation scary enough without adding any intentional scares. The slightly jerky nature of the movement is a constant reminder of the endless invisible positioning and repositioning that occurs. It speaks to my darkest terror – that we have no free will and are really just playthings for unseen gods, posing here, there and everywhere for nothing more than their sport. We’re just puppets, see? Puppets with illusory notions of freedom and independence. Do you still see? Do you see?
I am sorry. Where was I? A three-part 90-minute stop-motion special, The House. OKAY.
The first and by far the most successful of the trio is directed (using hushed, bulbous-headed figures that – even without my particular terrors – lie somewhere on the line between utterly charming and utterly disturbing) by Belgian authors Emma De Swaef and Marc James Roels and set around the turn of the last century. An impoverished family is persuaded to move out by the architect’s emissary, Mr. Thomas, who is voiced by master of weirdness Mark Heap (and whose presence adds an ineffably unnerving extra touch to anyone who recognizes the reed tones who never foretold good). They leave their small home for a much larger, purpose-built and fully furnished affair, built on a nearby hill, where all modern conveniences are provided – lights come on automatically at nightfall, all meals are provided . You don’t need to have recently watched BBC thriller The Girl Before to have a bad feeling about it, but it helps.
Sure enough, it quickly becomes apparent that even in Edwardian times there was no free breakfast, lunch or tea. The house will demand a price. Parents (voiced by Matthew Goode and Claudie Blakley) quickly become slaves to her dark spirit (or that of her owner, whose shadowy face sometimes overlaps the whole thing – you know the drill). Their young daughter, Mabel (Mia Goth), remains unchanged, but the malevolent house transforms around her so she cannot reach her delighted parents in time to save them from the raging conflagration that eventually consumes them.
There’s nothing narratively innovative here, but the enchanted parents, the disbelieving or unfamiliar child, and the inability to reach safety – no matter how many hallways you go through and how many turns you you spin – are always effective nightmare tropes, and rendering them this way adds a novelty that refreshes them. And the design, the overall aesthetic, is beautiful.
It’s a toss up between which of the other two is the least rewarding. In the one directed by Niki Lindroth von Bahr, the house is being renovated in the present by a beleaguered developer (voiced by Jarvis Cocker). We meet him for the first time as he tries to attract new investment and repel an invasion of “furry beetles” (this time the characters are anthropomorphized animals – the Developer, who has no other name, is a rat). His troubles multiply when a pair of supposed potential buyers who come to the open house refuse to leave. They are soon joined by a host of other friends and relatives. The final scenes reveal the developer with his spirit well and truly broken. But the story is too undercooked to deliver any real horrors or function as a fable about violation, or capitalism, or any of the other themes that it seems at various points to vaguely nod to.
The latest, directed by Paloma Baeza, finds Rosa (a cat figure, this time voiced by Susan Wokoma) engaged in a futile battle to restore the house as the floodwaters of the future rise inexorably around her.
She has tenants, played by Helena Bonham Carter and Will Sharpe, but they pay her in fish and crystals – currencies unacceptable to the plumbers and electricians she would like to employ. One by one, her tenants leave to find a safer berth elsewhere and eventually she is persuaded to leave too.
That last third is a very, very light affair. Had the content of the stories matched the minute form, the anthology might have been more of a breakthrough success. As things stand, architects have to go back to the drawing board.