There might be no greater treat for a film fan than that giddy rush you feel when a film comes from out of nowhere to knock you on your ass. You feel that rush more often when you’re younger and just inhaling culture as quickly as possible. Especially when you have access to cable, it seems like every day is an opportunity to throw on a random movie and have your world completely rocked, your personal list of canon movies upended. I still remember the day I stumbled across Phantom of the Paradise and, being vaguely familiar with the title, figured it’d be worth a watch.
Ninety minutes later, it was like I’d been dropped through a trapdoor. But, like, in a good way. Like I’d been dropped through a trapdoor and into… pudding. Yummy… pudding. Fuck, that sucked. Anyway, my point is, even as you get older that hunger never goes away, that desire to have something spring out and catch you totally off guard.
But, again, I mean that in a fun way. It springs out… of… pudding… maybe. Screw it.
Long story short, Housebound is the latest film to come out of nowhere and completely blow me away. I’d only heard it about from scattered festival reviews and some Twitter chatter from esteemed movie folk like Bob Freelander and Scott Weinberg. Knowing nothing about the film besides the bare-bone premise, I fired up the ol’ Netflix Instant on the Internet machine and settled in.
Now, it would be easy to assume that there could be no more played out a subgenre than the haunted house. After all, the tropes and tricks used to startle and disorient the viewer haven’t really been amended since the days of Roger Corman and William Castle. And those bad motherfuckers also had rubber skeletons to fling at the audience. What hope could a modern filmmaker have in giving a contemporary audience the heebie-jeebies with croaks, groans, and slamming doors?
Somehow, smart filmmakers continue to find new ways to wring blood from this old stone. Jennifer Kent managed to deliver one of last year’s finest films with The Babadook, utilizing the haunted house surface to dig into a meditation on madness and grief.
And now there’s Housebound, and this New Zealand-based spookablast from first-time writer director Gerard Johnstone is exactly as accomplished as Kent’s achievement, only directed towards gleeful fun as opposed to punishing emotional depths. Housebound is a near-perfect horror comedy, expertly treading on that tonal high wire to deliver an experience not unlike the best of Joe Dante or the early work of Peter Jackson. This is horror as giddy funhouse ride, and Johnstone and his excellent cast know exactly how to thrill and chill their customers.
The movie kicks off with young Kylie (Morgana O’Reilly) being busted for petty crime. She’s been in and out of rehabilitation and detention centers, and nothing has worked. The judge decides to sentence her to eight months of house arrest, hoping that the forced stability will soothe the girl’s hostile temper.
A couple of problems immediately emerge: 1) Kylie is now forced to live with her mother Miriam (Rima Te Wiata) and from the moment Miriam opens her mouth to speak, there is never any question as to how Kylie has become this rage-fueled mess.
2) Miriam lives in a giant, rundown house and she is quite convinced that there is an undead spirit roaming the halls, a belief that steadily begins to work on Kylie.
Housebound has a brilliant, droll sense of humor, and Johnstone really works in these early sections to sell you on the tone of the film. This is a very, very funny movie, but never at the expense of the characters or story. Johnstone uses darkness and sound expertly, crafting wonderfully tense sequences as the house itself seems to squirm and shift around Kylie, the creaks and squeaks growing more unsettling as she cannot place the source and becomes more and more involved in figuring out what’s going on.
To say any more about where the film goes with its story would be absolutely criminal, so I’ll just say that Johnstone has written a script without an ounce of fat, happily smashing through story points and veering into unseen directions. More than one horror subgenre comes into play, and Johnston seems positively jubilant to get to flex different muscles as he assaults his heroes with horror.
Even with this great foundation, the film would not work at all without O’Reilly at its heart. An absolute movie star from the very first frame, O’Reilly communicates volumes even with a dearth of lines. Kylie regards the world through an unshakeable scowl, but O’Reilly finds the quiet moments of vulnerability that lets us remain firmly in Kylie’s corner. She handles the physical demands with aplomb, and showcases a wicked comic timing that keeps the laughs coming even when the film shifts towards its darkest moments.
She’s matched by Te Wiata as the loveably insufferable mother. Together, they form a great, combative ghostbusting unit as likely to get into a screaming match as they are to bust any actual ghosts. Te Wiata has to handle much of the expositional load, and she makes the machine-gun verbiage seem as easy as breathing. Miriam is the sort of person who simply never, ever stops talking, burying friends, loved ones, and strangers under a metric ton of verbiage, and it results in some of the film’s best moments.
As funny as the film is from start to finish, Johnstone also earns the ‘horror’ end of the equation. While he doesn’t come close to dethroning Peter Jackson as the Kiwi King of Karo Syrup, Johnstone isn’t fucking about. When it comes time to deliver the gory goods, he’s happy to bury the audience in splatter, dousing Kylie and other characters in gallons of that good red stuff.
Housebound could not have been an expensive movie given how extensively it is, you know, bound in a house. But Johnstone’s direction makes that low budget sing, with gorgeous compositions by cinematographer Simon Riera that fill the house with shadow and surround the characters with malevolent empty spaces. Johnstone also shows a master’s touch as editor, expertly calibrating the film’s mad-dash through story and suspense sequences. The film is propulsive, yes, but never feels frenetic, as if he is just rushing through plot to get to the good bits.
Housebound leaves me flabbergasted. It’s the sort of surprise that has me fucking jazzed on horror, on movies, on stories, period. I found myself growing more and more nervous as the film went along, convinced that there would have to be some misstep, that no first-time filmmaker could possibly create something so confident, so polished, so unerringly fucking good without a stumble. But Johnstone never misses a step, and he has immediately rocketed to the top of my list of directors to watch. Films like this are a reminder of why we sift through so much crap, hoping against illogical hope that there’s a diamond to be found there.
We do it because of course there are diamonds in the filth. This one is called Housebound, and it’s creepy and funny and sometimes there are blood geysers. You owe yourself a viewing.
Housebound is currently streaming on Netflix, and available on Blu-ray exclusively from Amazon.
Get it at Amazon:
[Blu-ray] | [DVD]
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