Premise: A young engineer's science experiment accidentally conjures a malevolent force.
I like to use horror anthologies as a starting point to find other horror movies. It lets me get a taste for several directors and writers in a short amount of time. If they can make a good 5-20 short film, maybe they can make a good feature film too. That's how I came to Our House. The director made a great short for the anthology Holidays. It was based on Father's Day and is all about a woman lured to a mysterious place while listening to a cryptic tape recorded by her late father. It's a terrific bit of atmosphere and the standout short from that movie.
Our House is the director's feature debut, and it pulls from similar ideas. It also has dead parents and a mysterious force luring the children that is probably evil. Anthony Scott Burns (the director) seems to specialize at how longing can trick people into making poor decisions. Our House is less atmospheric than his Holidays short. It's more traditional in the scares and conclusion. I liked it though. Enough of the good stuff was still there. It's weird how rarely sadness is used as an entry point for scares in movies.
Thomas Mann is good in the lead role. His hard to pin down age makes it easy to pull off several roles. He does seem old enough to be taking care of his younger siblings after their parents die yet he also fits as a young college student. I'm not as crazy about Nicola Peltz. I can see why they cast her in this coming off Bate Motel. I'm looking for the non-lazy way to say she's too pretty for the role, because that's not exactly what I mean. She just looks too much like she came off the set of The Hills to be in the scenes for this movie. I wish I had better words for it. She was distracting though in a way that a Natalia Dyer, Zoey Deutch, or Haley Lu Richardson wouldn't've been.
Our House isn't a total hit; however, it hits enough of the right beats that I remain curious about what else this filmmaker is up to.
Verdict: Weakly Recommend
No comments:
Post a Comment