Netflix���s ‘The House’ Is An Unsettling Stop-Motion Film With Something To Say

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.

It’s an easy detail to forget, because it’s easy to get lost in the compelling narrative of the three short animated films that make up The House. Each tale—which, while animated, are dark and creepy and morbid and decidedly not for young children—centers on a different house. The houses are beacons of corruption, objects of scams, and symbols of thwarted dreams. The protagonists move into them, out of them, fix them up, tear them down, and ride them off into the sunset. And with all three houses come lessons about materialism, about deception, and about letting go.

The first tale, titled simply “Story 1,” is directed by Marc James Roels and Emma de Swaef, a Belgium stop-motion filmmaking duo. Roels and de Swaef’s gorgeous set takes viewers back to the 1800s, where a family of four (all vaguely off-putting fabric dolls) is living in a modest home. After a visit from his overly critical mother, the father of the family, Raymond (voiced by Matthew Goode), takes a drunken midnight walk and makes a deal with a mysterious architect who offers to gift the family a new, luxurious house for free. The only catch? They have to leave all of their old belongings behind.

Raymond’s wife Penny (Claudie Blakey) is hesitant at first, but she quickly gets on board when she sees the house comes with a top-of-the-line sewing machine. Husband and wife are so enchanted by their new possessions—a magnificent fireplace, electric light bulbs, fine fabrics—they completely ignore their two children, Mabel (voiced by Mia Goth) and the baby Isobel. I won’t spoil the story’s ending, but it comes with a macabre, Edgar Allen Poe-esque twist to ensure they pay for their sins. All the while, you get caught up in the world, but you’ll be reminded of the artistic achievement with wide shots that reveal an elaborate diorama, like a scene where Raymond watches from the window while his old home is torn down. It’s moments like these where you’ll marvel at the sheer creation of it all, a story created not just with words but physical objects.

The second story, directed by Swedish animator and filmmaker Niki Lindroth von Bahr, takes things from “gothic children’s fairy tale” creepy to straight-up horror movie creepy. Set in the modern-day in a world of anthropomorphic rats, a nameless contractor (voiced by Jarvis Cocker) cuts corners by firing his construction crew for a renovation, hoping to do a quick job of it himself in order to upsell a shoddy home to a rich sucker. He’s in over his head—the place has a nasty infestation of wriggly, crawly bugs that won’t go away with simple spraying. But despite his disastrous showing, an old, unsettling rat couple is “very interested” in the house. It soon becomes clear that the couple is scamming the scammer right back. To say it doesn’t end well for the contractor is putting it mildly—the final, haunting shot is an image so viscerally disturbing, so relentlessly bleak, that I’ll be thinking about it for weeks to come. And yet, it is also an artistic triumph achieved by destroying such a meticulously-built set.

The third and final story of The House, directed by Paloma Baeza, ends, thankfully, on a more uplifting note. A landlady named Rosa (voiced by Susan Wokoma) is determined to pursue her life-long dream of fixing up a crumbling but beautiful Victorian home, despite the fact that a devastating flood has driven away almost all of her residents. The two that remain, Elias (voiced by Will Sharpe) and Jen (voiced by Helena Bonham Carter), know that they too must move on soon, as the water will fill the house within a matter of days. But Rosa refuses to see it. She blithely continues to re-paper walls and fix floorboards, stubbornly sticking her life plan, despite the fact that a catastrophe has clearly uprooted it. Though lacking the dark and gruesome imagery of the first two stories, it was this one that hit me the hardest, as I and so many of my friends have put our lives on hold indefinitely for the pandemic, again. I can only hope that, like Rosa and her beautiful home, we can find a way to sail into the flood.

Watch The House on Netflix