Finished watching: The House Was Not Hungry Then 🍿

Here there be spoilers.

Shirley Jackson opens The Haunting of Hill House by calmly informing you that Hill House is not sane. It’s right up there with “The man in black fled into the desert, and the gunslinger followed” as a perfect opening line for a story. And it repeated itself inside my head while I was watching Harry Aspinwall’s The House Was Not Hungry Then, because this felt like what Hill House: The Early Years must have been like. Before the evil hardened into the foundation and worked its way into the cracks in the walls.

The setup is simple. A young woman goes looking for her estranged father and breaks into an empty house in the Scottish countryside. People who visit that house tend to disappear. A man posing as a realtor keeps bringing them there.

The camera angles slowly command your attention. We cut to different rooms in the house, but each room has a fixed camera view. Action sometimes happens around the edges of the frame. Some online reviewers hate this. I slowly came to realize that this is by design. The house itself is choosing what you see. You’re firmly within its world and its rules.

Other houses that are not sane

Somewhere in the first half hour I started building a list, because why not whip up a new taxonomy before breakfast. These are places that feel like they exist in the same universe, hotspots where reality goes a little wrong:

  • Hill House
  • The Overlook from The Shining, book and movie both
  • The house in Burnt Offerings
  • The tunnel in Mike Flanagan’s Absentia
  • The Backrooms
  • And now this house

Kinship, not theft

Earlier the same day I watched Insidious: Out of the Further, which has a pillow fort scene that suddenly expands into something vast. Hey dawg, we heard you liked Backrooms, so we put some Backrooms in your Backrooms. ☑️ On to the next trope.

The House Was Not Hungry Then has that same liminal feeling, and so do Skinamarink and Absentia, but none of it feels borrowed. Not a ripoff or homage. More like this is a thing that happens in the world, in many places, and this movie happened to point a camera at one of them.

Quibbles

Those title cards, which seem to be the house’s voice, flirt uncomfortably close with both pretentiousness and cuteness. The ending edges into manic pixie dream girl territory. She shares an earbud with the house so it can listen to music too, and the credits roll while “they” listen together. A little twee. Also, I did begin to wonder how the police never noticed that every missing person went to the same house with the same realtor. Not a great sign when reality starts to intrude on the film’s world.

Small things I liked anyway: a phone call with her dad (never on camera, but instantly recognizable as Scottish actor Bill Paterson) that captured the awkwardness and repetition of calls with my own dad in college, and a quaintly Scottish atmosphere that makes the whole thing feel older than it is. There’s an assuredness to the choices here that makes it feel like a legacy film.

Verdict

3 stars. It’s a tone poem, not a plot movie. I didn’t follow every crossing storyline and enjoyed the world-building. In the interest of full disclosure, I watched it with some 🌿 onboard, and I’m pretty sure that helped my patience. But if you want something creative that commits to its choices, here it is.