Netflix And Chill: Our House (2018)

Science is great. If applied correctly. We could eradicate every major world problem. Alternatively, science can also provide some very unexpected results. It’s never the best day at the lab when you end up accidentally creating ghosts while putting the finishing touches on a device that is supposed to generate electricity from nothing. Unfortunately, that is what happens to Ethan (Thomas Mann), the lead character in Our House.

When we first meet Ethan, he is so busy trying to finish his important experiment that he is unable to spend much time with his parents and siblings. That soon changes when he receives a phone call to inform him that his parents have died in an automobile accident. He now has to be the main carer for Matt (Percy Hynes White) and Becca (Kate Moyer). It's not long until some of them start to sense another presence in the house, which they suspect could be their deceased parents trying to communicate with them. And they seem to grow more powerful when Ethan turns his "failed experiment" back on.

Based on a film that was itself less than a decade old (Ghost From The Machine, by Matt Osterman), Our House is a film with plenty of potential for good atmosphere and scares. To be fair, there are some good moments here and there, and the visual representation of the spirits, as black smoke trying to solidify themselves into a humanoid form, works well. Director Anthony Scott Burns had been honing his craft for a number of years before making this his feature debut (including delivering "Father's Day", one of the better segments in the anthology horror Holidays) and he handles things well enough. He just doesn't seize the opportunity to fill up every space with growing tension and creepiness.

Writer Nathan Parker doesn't help. The central idea is a very easy one to communicate to viewers, freeing everyone up to focus on scares, but he decides to give an equal amount of time to the day-to-day problems that our lead experiences while moving from the role of brother to that of main guardian. I understand why he would want to do that, but it's never as engaging as the developing spookiness. Like many films, this sits in a middle ground. It would either need to be streamlined into a fantastic frightfest, paring down the family drama to something minimal, or the runtime could be expanded slightly to allow more time spent showing the strain and tension affecting everyone while the spirits start to push their way into their plane.

Mann is a decent lead, and both White and Moyer are believable in their respective roles. Nicola Peltz plays Hannah and Robert B. Kennedy is a neighbour named Tom. Both do fine, but they can't overcome the fact that their characters feel superfluous to requirements. The same can be said for Marie, a different neighbour played by Marcia Bennett. I may be wrong, but the film could have been greatly improved if the main characters felt isolated and trapped in their house as things began to get worse and worse.

Although it's perfectly okay for most of the runtime, things are dragged down by an ending that feels horribly rote and unengaging. It's enough to drag the whole thing just below average, and leaves it being something that I wouldn't recommend to others.

4/10

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Mubi Monday: Our House (2017)

One of those little, effective movies that you often catch at film festivals, just before they disappear and become almost impossible to track down, Our House is an engrossing drama that feels very much like it's one step away from being a supernatural horror movie. In fact, I'm still not entirely convinced that it isn't.

Seri (Nodoka Kawanishi) lives with her mother (Yukiko Yasuno). Her father died, something she is struggling to move on from, and things become more difficult as she learns that her mother is dating a new man. Toko (Mei Fujiwara) lives alone, but only until she finds Sana (Mariwo Ohsawa), a woman who is troubled by a lack of memory. This quartet of people live in the same house, with neither couple realising that the other couple exists. Is there an explanation for this, be it time trickery or some dimensional overlap, and does it even matter?

I struggled to even piece together the cast list for this film, taking my information from a variety of sources (IMDb, MUBI, various pieces already written about the movie), so I apologise now for anything that is incorrect. Just about the only thing I am sure of is that this was directed by Yui Kiyohara, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Noriko Katô. It is the debut feature of Kiyohara, created as a graduation project (this nugget of information was provided by MUBI), and marks her out as someone definitely worth keeping an eye on.

I'll mention the four main performances, before I forget about them. Kawanishi and Yasuno both do very well alongside one another, giving realistic and grounded portrayals of a child and parent who love one another but are temporarily at odds. Fujiwara and Ohsawa get more interesting material to play around with, more moments that are often surreal and strange, and both do equally well in their roles, showing themselves to be individuals battling with whatever is hidden deep within themselves, another aspect never fully revealed.

But this is a film about atmosphere, and about time and place. It's a film in which lives interconnect without anyone really realising that, all shown in an interestingly overt way to sum up the various interactions we have that make us what we are. Toko may be the lynchpin, seeming to spend most of her time away from so many other people and happily alone. Compared to every other character in the film, she feels like the one person who doesn't need anything else in her life . . . until she does, which she struggles to deal with during the third act. It's almost as if Kiyohara and Katô are telling people that it is absolutely impossible to ignore all of the experiences that made you who you are today. Blocking them out will only lead to a painful reawakening further down the line.

Or maybe they're not saying that at all. Maybe this is something else entirely. Maybe it's just an exercise in atmosphere and subtle acting. It also works in those simpler terms. I didn't love Our House, I would have liked a little bit more to it (although I am not one of those people who needs every question answered in my movies), but it hooked me in quite early on, and kept me there for the entire, brief, runtime.

7/10