Netflixs The House Is An Unsettling Stop-Motion Film With Something To Say

Table Of Content

• Storyline
• Meryl Streep Says She Was “Traumatized” Watching Nicole Kidman in ‘Big Little Lies’ at AFI Life Achievement Gala
• Real-Life ‘Baby Reindeer’ Stalker Speaks Out Following Netflix Show Success
• Netflix’s The House is an unsettling anthology wrapped in cozy stop-motion
• ‘Unfrosted’ Review: Melissa McCarthy in Jerry Seinfeld’s Lightweight but Satisfying Pop-Tarts Origin Story

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. On the day of the viewing, the guests are unimpressed by the house, but a strangely proportioned couple remains, expressing a strong interest in buying the house. Over the next few days, the odd couple remain firmly settled in the house, the bugs return in force, and the bank keeps demanding repayment of the developer's business loan.

Storyline

The only constant is the house, which is always recognizable despite superficial changes over the years. Like the first two chapters, the final story centers on a single-minded striver obsessed with her house, and watching her ambitions deflate around her. But where the first story is chilling and the second one is saddening, the third has other ambitions that make the whole project fall more clearly into place. All three parts were scripted by Irish playwright and screenwriter Enda Walsh (best known for 2008’s gutting historical film Hunger, directed by Steve McQueen and starring Michael Fassbender). And while Walsh’s scripts don’t initially seem to take place in the same world or have much in common, apart from the house’s layout, this third segment brings all three into focus.

Meryl Streep Says She Was “Traumatized” Watching Nicole Kidman in ‘Big Little Lies’ at AFI Life Achievement Gala

The house is now marooned on a nondescript body of rising water, surrounded by a pink mist. But the current cat landlord Rosa (Susan Wokoma) is obsessed with refurbishing the place, and has a whole plan charted out. Meanwhile her two current tenants, Elias (Will Sharpe) and Jen (Helena Bonham Carter), don’t pay rent with money but they do share a type of family bond with each other.

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The first two have a spooky twist, the third is a more straightforward if dystopian tale. The three-story anthology explores the many definitions of what a house can be using different tones and techniques. It also proves the vitality that this special kind of animation can bring to the screen. 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.

The developer, having regressed to animal-like intelligence, briefly emerges from the remains of the oven to eat garbage before retreating underground. The story is set in a world populated by anthropomorphic rats, and the house is now settled in a developed city street and about to go up for sale. The developer renovating the house recently laid off his entire construction crew to reduce costs and must do all the work himself. Discovering the house has been infested by fur beetles and larvae, he uses copious amounts of boric acid to get rid of them, to no avail. They shared meals at his place, and he even thought they might move back together.

For this first installment of a two-part series (click here to read part two) on the making of “The House,” IndieWire spoke with the filmmakers, as well as producer Charlotte Bavasso, writer Enda Walsh, and Oscar-winning musician Gustavo Santaolalla. Come back tomorrow for an in-depth, behind the scenes breakdown of the film’s three segments. If the content of the stories had matched the painstaking form, the anthology could have been rather a groundbreaking success.

Netflix’s The House is an unsettling anthology wrapped in cozy stop-motion

It’s now an apartment complex, and the landlord, a cat named Rosa (Susan Wokoma) — she’s literally a cat, as is everyone else in this story — is determined to renovate the mansion. But she can’t get rent from her two remaining tenants; a young man named Elias (Will Sharpe) pays her in fish and a hippie lady named Jen (Helena Bonham Carter) pays her in crystals. When one of Jen’s mystical friends named Cosmos (Paul Kaye) comes to visit, Jen is shown that it’s time to let go of the house, but she stubbornly wants to stay put.

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After her adoptive parents reported her missing, Yang’s body was discovered on the side of the road, and her parents were arrested shortly after. Netflix’s new investigative thriller, The Asunta Case, recently arrived on the streaming platform. Discover what happened to Asunta Fong Yang in real life, including the fate of her adoptive parents. Every so often while watching The House, a new stop-motion film on Netflix, I would remember that every single frame had been meticulously set up and photographed, and my mind would be blown all over again. Realism was a top aesthetic priority for Baeza, even in her “completely fantastical world with cats walking around,” and the look of water proved one of the most challenging components.

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And with all three houses come lessons about materialism, about deception, and about letting go. Despite the various circumstances and timelines, in each story the house represents a kind of lifeline for the characters. It’s a chance for a family to inspire jealousy, for a mouse to pull himself out of the crushing weight of debt, and for a cat to slowly build the home of her dreams. What’s most interesting about The House is how each story offers a different riff on this theme. The first two chapters lean into being creepy, particularly their unsettling endings, but while the first is more of a slow-building dread, the second is much more tangible. Meanwhile, the final chapter, despite starting out quite bleak, ends on a surprisingly hopeful note.

Two years later, in September 2013, Asunta resumed her studies after a summer holiday with her nanny in her home village. Her parents stayed nearby in Santiago at their beach apartment, only spending one week of those six weeks with their daughter. After having worked separately on their own vision, watching their individual pieces come together as a powerful storytelling unit resulted in great emotional satisfaction for the directors. To Baeza, cats are poised creatures, making them the ideal subjects for her segment.

As the least bleak of the three shorts, this one shows how the promise of a house has a seductive power, representing a desire to cling to the past even when the floor below you is slowly flooding. It’s also another striking feat of stop-motion animation, with lifelike sets and clothes that practically breathe as the furry characters move. “The House” is an animated anthology with an inspired narrative focus, as it tells the history of one building, across time and species.

You don’t have to have recently watched the BBC’s thriller The Girl Before to get a bad feeling about this, but it helps. The House, produced by UK-based Nexus Studios and streamed by Netflix, is an adult stop-motion anthology special. Three stories of roughly half an hour each are set in the same house in different eras.

As the investigation unfolds, the couple is arrested for her murder, causing shockwaves throughout the country. Candela Peña and Tristán Ulloa star in the gripping drama that’s quickly risen to the No. 2 spot in the U.S. on Netflix. The goal of /r/Movies is to provide an inclusive place for discussions and news about films with major releases. Submissions should be for the purpose of informing or initiating a discussion, not just to entertain readers.

The House, one of Netflix’s first new releases of the year, is a straightforward concept. It’s a film split into three chapters, each helmed by a different director, all of which explore a different story related to the same sprawling home. What connects each short, aside from the physical house and stop-motion animation, is a creeping sense of dread. The House looks cute, with talking animals and dollhouse-like visuals, but in each story there’s something lurking just beneath the surface; something wrong, unsettling.

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. 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.