Unoriginal and leaden paced, the Canadian produced supernatural thriller Our House cribs liberally from a bunch of stale genre staples and presents itself with a minimal amount of energy or vibrancy. It’s a film that’s less likely to quicken the pulse or jolt the viewer to life and more likely to lull them to sleep. If you’ve ever seen a film where spirits from another plane of reality terrorize an unsuspecting family, there’s positively no reason to see Our House. Even films at the low end of this genre at least try to have some sudden jump scares and jolts to cover up for a lack of originality or substance. Our House is so toothless and boring that it might just redefine what “the low end” means.
Ethan (Thomas Mann) is a university student who has been working tirelessly on trying to create a new form of wireless electricity, putting almost everything else in his life on hold in the process. Ethan’s plans are shattered, however, when his parents are killed in a car accident, and he’s forced to return home to be the guardian of his younger brother, Matt (Percy Hynes White), and little sister, Becca (Kate Moyer). Whenever he’s not carting the kids around in the family minivan or working as a hardware store cashier, Ethan continues tinkering with his invention. The device works, but not in the way Ethan planned. Instead of providing clean, efficient energy, it has opened a spiritual conduit that makes communication with ghosts of dead people possible. Matt and Becca are thrilled that they appear to be communicating with the ghosts of their parents, but it’s quickly apparent that the spirits in their home aren’t friendly and that they’re growing stronger by the moment.
Our House comes from screenwriter Nathan Parker (Moon, Equals) and marks the feature directorial debut of Anthony Scott Burns, but really it’s the type of film that probably could have been made by A.I. Taking plot points directly and unambiguously from the likes of Flatliners, Frequency, White Noise, and Poltergeist, Our House is already saddled with a cliché packed screenplay that can’t be bothered to come up with even a single original idea. What makes things even worse is realizing that Our House is itself already a remake of a somewhat obscure 2010 American supernatural thriller, Ghost from the Machine. I haven’t seen that film, but I’ve seen every other film that Burns and Parker are trying to riff on. My only hope is that the original film had a lot more life and momentum than Our House does.
A good film can overcome clichéd material by openly admitting that nothing it’s doing is original. This can be accomplished by either having fun with the material or directing and performing everything so well that any glaring flaws have been papered over. Scott can’t manage either of those things. The tone of Our House is so resolutely dour and serious that any form of levity has been bled from sight. It’s understandable that a film about the loss of parents at a young age would want to confront feelings of grief head on, but the domestic drama that lies at the heart of Our House is just as rote and tiresome as the horror and sci-fi elements. One could probably count the number of times someone smiles in Our House on a single hand. The actors are all asked to brood and mope their way through this thing, earning little audience sympathy or empathy in the process. It doesn’t help that Parker’s screenplay doesn’t add any depth to the sadness of the characters. Outside of Ethan’s stress level and workaholic tendencies, a helpful neighbour (Robert B. Kennedy) who lost his wife, and Becca’s love of swimming, the audience won’t know anything about these characters that will ultimately be worth a damn.
It’s a good looking film, at least. Even if the production design is a bit drab by haunted house standards (which honestly seems to be the point), the cinematography and lighting are appropriately shadowy and sleek. It helps to give the viewer something interesting to look at when there isn’t much going on, which would comprise approximately 95% of the movie. The ghost story stuff doesn’t really get going until the halfway point, and by then the film is already racing headlong into its climax. None of the set pieces are spooky or cleverly mounted. Unless you get freaked out at the sight of black, smoky shadows hovering in the background, levitating teddy bears, or record players that turn themselves on, you’ll find nary a single thing about Our House that would be remotely scary. It’s as creepy as a seconds long power outage happening on a bright summer day.
The actors can’t do anything to save this, and Burns’ hopelessly padded direction frames these performances almost to the point of parody. One could probably create a lethal drinking game out of the number of lingering shots where Mann’s forced to deliver exasperated, exhausted sighs (which I hope is a reflection of how little he seems to care about this role) or White has to sullenly brood and grimace. They’re both decent actors, but the combination of bad material and bad direction leaves them adrift. Nicola Peltz gets a thankless part as Ethan’s girlfriend and former lab partner, popping up a couple of times to provide exposition or threadbare emotional development that’s so obvious that spelling it out only adds running time to something that already feels punishingly long in the tooth. Newcomer Moyer fares the best, however, as the little sister, and the film’s only truly resonant or spooky moments involve her character. Our House is so slight and forgettable that everyone will escape this thing unscathed, but at least Moyer’s work here points towards a performer with a brighter future.
Our House can’t find a way to justify its own existence, even on the cheapest, most basic levels of entertainment. It’s a rip-off that has abandoned the ingenuity and energy of everything that’s come before it. About a quarter of the film is comprised of establishing shots and silent moments that might mean something if they were built into a stronger narrative. Most damningly, the film’s exploration of survivor’s guilt is so limp that it can’t explain why Ethan doesn’t stop his experiments the second things start getting spooky. The characters in Our House are presented with two options: engage with a high concept plot that’s been done to death or do nothing and just try to get on with their lives. While the former option should be more exciting, Our House is so monotonous that one might prefer that everyone involved chose the latter approach.
Our House opens at Cineplex Yonge and Dundas in Toronto and on VOD on Friday, July 27, 2018.
Check out the trailer for Our House:
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