Our House

The best horror movies focus on the real life things that scare us like being alone, being attacked in a place you think is safe, and death. It means that grief and trauma are baked into the genre. But there's another powerful force not every horror movie taps into: guilt. Which brings me to this solid indie horror flick: Our House.

The Setup

The film begins with Ethan, a promising your man on track to graduate from MIT and do revolutionary work on a new energy sustainable energy source. But when tragedy strikes, and Ethan's parents died unexpectedly, Ethan will have to fill in to care for his siblings. As tension mounts, Ethan decides to revisit his experiment and discovers he may have accidentally opened a door to the other side...but who or what came over?

I really like the setup for this movie. It's nice blend of horror and science fiction that stays just grounded enough for its budget, matches the story, and fills in some decent scary moments.

This movie is about Ethan coming to terms with his guilt. See the first time he tried to do his experiment, Ethan's parents died in a car accident...in a car he should've been driving. So it makes perfect sense that he over-corrects and becomes a full time parent to his younger siblings. He takes them to school, he works a customer service job, and tries to maintain the house. But he's clearly unhappy with this life, which is a lot for anyone, let alone a kid to handle, and his siblings hold resentments toward him. 

So that push to try out his failed machine again makes sense. It's both more fulfilling than his current life and a subconscious attempt to make sure his parents did pass away needlessly. If this works he can justify what he did. And when that brings in some supernatural entities that may or may not be their parents, he understandably keeps pushing the limits.

Of course we know not everything is going to be alright, this is a horror movie, and the film has a lot of fun plugging in weird comments from Ethan's sister about her "imaginary" friend and other people being scared off. They're specters of grief and guilt that could eat them alive either by obsession or literally. We just don't know.

It's also noteworthy that said ghosts have a limited radius, and thus can only operate near and around the house. It's another barrier between the family and anyone on the outside, including Ethan's nice but understandably suspicious girlfriend.

From there we have a lot of standard ghost movie escalation, a mystery about what's really going on, and a final showdown for all the marbles. It's solid, if somewhat predictable. Like most of these movies, the best scares are in the middle section.

The fun is in the details including the performances of the young cast, notably Thomas Mann as Ethan, the water color look of the ghosts, and the aforementioned themes. As far as indie horror goes, this is pretty solid.

Verdict: Solid Setup and Scares

Our House may fall into ghost movies tropes by the end, but its premise and performances win a recommendation. 7/10