Housebound (2014)
(In French, On Cable TV, February 2022) I really wasn’t expecting much from Housebound, and there are several moments where the film sorely tests anyone’s patience or indulgence. But it does eventually work much better than expected, with a few twists and turns that all play to its central theme and a pace that gets cracking when it needs to do so. The opening act is truly not very promising, though, as a too-irritating protagonist is put in house arrest following a botched robbery. The problem is that she’d probably like being in prison better than going back to her semi-rural childhood house for six months: she keeps picking fights with her mom, and strange sounds coming from the house are not calming her down—nor her mom’s insistence that the house is haunted. In a plot development that nearly blows up suspension of disbelief, she then discovers that her home was the site of an infamous grisly murder—something that somehow never came up while she was living there. If you can somehow get over that inanity long enough and also somehow ignore how incredibly annoying the protagonist is, Housebound then swerves into a last straight sprint to the finish, uncovering secret identities, twists and counter-twists in such a way that the film essentially redeems itself in time for the end credits. It’s not quite a comedy, but there are a few moments here that are funnier than expected, and the counter-twists are both creepy and more original than expected. I don’t think that it makes Housebound anywhere near a hidden gem or anything like that, but writer-director-editor Gerard Johnstone exceeds low expectations (some of them he lowered by himself), and that’s already not that bad. It could have been improved in many ways, but it does make an interesting addition to the New Zealand horror canon.