How The House Can Help Us Survive Dorm Applications
Where is your home? This is a question I have found all too difficult to answer, but one that has been on my mind ever since I dubbed the people I had met at Brown University my “friends back home” during an awkward family dinner.
Before leaving for university, I had considered my home to be my physical residence – after all, that was where I ate, slept, and spent most of my time. And while I’d seen enough tacky Hobby Lobby signs to know that “home is where the heart is”, it wasn’t easy to say goodbye to my childhood room and the town I’d spent my whole life in. But while I was quite anxious over the move at first, I’ve been fortunate enough to have met lifelong friends both at Brown and in my hometown, and I can now safely say that I have two places I can call my home.
The cast of The House was not as lucky.
Released on Netflix in 2022, this three-part anthology follows one house’s inescapable grip on three sets of people, all depicted in eerie stop-motion. The film is split into three acts, each taking place in a different time period: in the first, we watch a family abandon their care for one another in favor of a lavish lifestyle; next, we see a salesman lose his humanity as he desperately attempts to find a buyer; and finally, we follow a landlord’s decision between her property and her tenants. All three stories take place in the same building, which acts as a cold and uncaring backdrop to the characters’ fates.
The House expertly blurs the line between zany comedy and psychological horror. At one moment, you’ll be watching a man on the verge of insanity, only to see his mental breakdown interrupted by a two-minute song and dance scene in which bugs play musical instruments. While some might call this pure silliness, these scenes do an excellent job at depriving viewers of any sense of constancy, and creating a feeling of uncertainty very similar to what one might experience when leaving home for the first time.
Further driving home this subversion of the familiar is the award-winning stop-motion work done by Kecy Salangad and his team. Salangland’s puppets are perfectly uncanny and yet full of expression, with tiny black eyes and felt faces that give them access to a shockingly large range of emotions. During scenes of high tension, I often found myself wincing, knowing that it was impossible to predict what was coming next.
But the film isn’t all dread and uncertainty. In the final act, our main character veers off the course set by her counterparts in the two acts prior, choosing to forgo the house in favor of journeying with her friends. To her, a home was useless if she had no one in it that cared about her.
I have been thinking a lot about homes this past month. With housing applications right around the corner, and the terrifying thought of having to rent a property sometime in the future, I have been quite concerned over where I am going to live. But I’ve realized that I don’t need to get my dream dorm to be happy (though a suite certainly wouldn’t hurt). I’ve felt welcome at Brown because of my friends, not because of my walls, and I’m hopeful that I’ll have a home no matter where I wind up.