Schema Magazine

DIR: Desiree Lim | 2011 | 109 mins

Houses haunted by ghosts are a recurrent theme in literature and movies since the birth of modern horror genre. Houses are artificial spaces, shaped by humans, to attend our primary need of being sheltered against an external world and its roaming dangers that threaten every one of us. It's why movies and tales about haunted houses are particularly so exciting.

Desiree Lim's film The House makes a clever usage of the haunted house concept (and its consequences for the viewer), even if it starts off conventionally, like many movies with similar themes. Jean, a former Wall Street banker that comes back to her hometown Vancouver after 6 months of globe throttling, settles herself in a huge house in the outskirts of the city and progressively notices that objects are being moved by other than her or the house maid. She realizes that she's not alone and that her unwished companies are not other humans or hallucinations—they are ghosts.

Madame du Deffand, famous for hosting in her salons horror story nights, synthesized the expectation of the viewer (or listener) of a ghost tale: "I don't believe in ghosts, but still, I'm afraid of them". Jean's reaction, according to Deffand's principle, should be fear. Instead, The House is an intelligent and unique film of the recurrent premise of alive denizen(s) versus dead denizen(s).

Jean confronts the ghosts in her house: Kevin, a philosophy professor, and his sister Liz and his brother in law Darrell, a trio whose kinship bonds are infused with an inseparable mix of love and grudge and represent a very elegant paraphrase of Jean-Paul Sartre's "No Exit". There are other ghosts, whose stories unfold as the film progresses.

The House is a film of great complexity. Tackling different issues with a profusion of references (none of them excessive), Desiree Lim offers us an intriguing narrative that's impossible to not touch our sensibilities, since they are based on the confrontation of two human experiences that can't be avoided in our existences—the one of being sheltered and the one of dying.