The House Review

The House is available now to stream on Netflix.

Is there any more underappreciated animation style than stop-motion? The sheer labor alone involved — meticulously assembling and then moving puppetry ligatures frame-by-frame to replicate movement more easily achieved on paper or inside a computer — is mind-boggling. It’s a niche art embraced by the very few, so when Netflix invests in its ongoing existence with a worthy project like The House, that’s something to celebrate.

Produced by Nexus Studios, The House is a collection of three separate short stories that share the same location: a Georgian-style mansion. While directed by different teams, the stories are thematically connected in how they explore the concept of home and especially the lengths some will go to attain, leverage, or keep one. Considering that the very act of buying a home is a first-world “benchmark” of maturity and financial success, The House wisely uses that concept to underscore the absurdities and emotional triggers inherent to the process.

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Each story is a standalone, with Chapter One directed by Emma De Swaef and Marc James Roels, Chapter 2 directed by Niki Lindroth Von Bahr, and Chapter 3 directed by Paloma Baeza. Each director uses the techniques of the medium, but their aesthetics, visual approaches, and narrative styles are all deeply unique and rewarding in different ways. If you’re a fan of animation, all three are visually sumptuous exercises that challenge the boundaries of the medium. This is strikingly cinematic filmmaking regardless of the housebound constraints within each story. The cinematography, lighting, textile usage, and overall ambition of what they bring to life with such detail is flat-out inspiring.

In terms of the individual stories, Chapter One makes a strong argument for itself as the most successful of the three just because of its precision in telling an M.R. James-esque tale of a family trapped within the walls of a house created to torment the adults within. From the off-putting design of the doughy-looking family members to the creepy and surrealistic visual motifs that pop up in the ever-changing architecture of the house, it all comes together in a chillingly effective cautionary tale about never being satisfied with what you have. The creative team also introduces us to a sister team for the ages with Mabel (Mia Goth) and Isabel. The pint-sized protagonists, with their smooshed faces, are voiced and acted so endearingly that they elevate the heart and the stakes of the whole piece.

How Chapter 2 lands with you entirely depends on your threshold for bugs. Set in a reality where mice exist like humans in contemporary times, a financially strapped house flipper takes on the home as a means to dig himself out of debt. Taking on the work himself, he makes everything look beautiful on the outside, but battles an infestation of pests that threaten to ruin his whole endeavor. It’s by far the most surreal of the three stories, even featuring a Cecil B. DeMille-style insect musical that is equal parts hysterical and horrific if you have any aversion to creepy crawlies.

Chapter 3 introduces the most beautiful landscapes of the whole film, taking place post global flood as homes are now rendered as tiny islands in an ecosystem threatening to swallow everything in its path. Following in the footsteps of the house flipper, Rosa (Susan Wokoma) is a cat that acts like a human. She owns a large house in huge disrepair that she is single-handedly trying to renovate into an apartment complex. As she labors daily to wallpaper rooms and battles broken pipes, her only two renters, Elias (Will Sharpe) and Jen (Helena Bonham Carter), try to get her to engage in the realities of her losing proposition. It ends up being a poignant exploration of the pain of change and how we cling to places to our detriment.

Every frame in every story is a feast for the eyes.

The teams behind The House should be commended for making the most of their storytelling time. Every frame in every story is a feast for the eyes. From the use of water environments to intricate uses of in-camera focus pulls to fish tanks set pieces, no one is sitting on their laurels and phoning in their stories. At worst, it’s a refreshing use of the stop-motion technique, and at best, it’s hopefully bewitching and inspiring a new generation of animators to push their own boundaries.