MovieChat Forums > House of Good and Evil (2013) Discussion > My thoughts on this film...(SPOILER ALER...

My thoughts on this film...(SPOILER ALERT)


I thought I'd right a review here since I use the app and you can't post in the review section on here.
I would definitely call House of Good and Evil one of those misleading films in terms of whether it is actually supernatural horror or a psychological thriller. Regarding this film, I would have to go with the latter. We meet the two underdeveloped characters in the very beginning, the husband obviously trying to get his wife to the hospital but thanks to a sea of traffic she ends up losing her baby. The wife obviously struggles with the loss much more than her husband and she has become semi-withdrawn, so her husband takes whisks her away to the country to start fresh at a home so isolated, the town's not bothering to get the power and phone lines fixed because their budget isn't big enough and the couple have to use a generator to power their home and find a spot outside of the house where they can get a decent signal. The town is 26 miles away, and they have only one vehicle. Are you starting to get a picture of how isolated this place is? Good.
The only strange thing is that the home has been made into a duplex and they find out they have neighbors--an old couple who mostly keep to themselves. The realtor says he got them the house and never even met them, but that they are leaving in a month to move to Florida. But soon the wife starts hearing a ringing phone that sounds to be coming from their new old neighbors, and the old couple fighting. There is also a door to a room that the realtor discovers is locked, but the realtor says he'll find them and drop them off soon. In addition to hearing things coming from her neighbors, she also begins to hear a crying baby coming from behind the locked door. This one is obvious in her psychosis. Woman loses baby,takes it badly. Same woman moves into a house in which is a door she cannot open to get to the crying baby. Classic symptoms of loss of her baby and fear that it will happen again.
To put the cherry on top of an oncoming psychotic break, her husband leaves for two weeks for work, leaving her all alone despite her plea to take her with him (to which he says no), with her crumbling mind and left to her own devices out in the middle of nowhere.
I don't want to ruin it for those who haven't seen this, but we eventually see her meet the neighbors. First the husband; later, the wife. We see her have two separate conversations with the wife. After the second conversation with the old woman, the wife gets the idea in her head that all men are monsters.
In the climax we see an altercation between the wife, her husband, and the old man. The wife, at first, calls her husband a monster and when the old man comes out she calls him one, as well. Then there seems to be a deneuement, but there is a twist.
Some things didn't make sense and seemed out of the ordinary (particularly with the husband--a couple of things he did, like making a decision to buy a house THAT isolated. It just seemed to be a weird thing to do, considering her wife's mental and emotional states--she should have been around a bit more people than that).
Anyway, as I said, during the climax the wife calls her husband a monster, but at the very end it made me wonder--WAS the wife really the monster, or was she right about her husband?
I give it an E for effort. It wasn't incoherent like a lot of the reviewers said--they obviously didn't pay attention, or it flew right over their heads. One problem I had with it, as I mentioned before, is the underdevelopment of the main characters. All we basically know is maybe once they were happy and pregnant, but then she lost the baby and they moved to get away from the city and possibly save their marriage, but she can't get over it and it causes a rift in their relationship. We know practically nothing about the husband except his name and that he's a fireman. The lack of character development made them seem devoid of any real personality, and the predictable unraveling of their marriage is nothing shocking and the amount of films with a plot such as this, where the woman sees and hears things and the husband thinks she's going crazy. It makes them seem generic as a couple.
My personal rating is 6/10. It may seem not to make sense, but if you pay attention you'll notice that it kinda does. It's not entirely sophomoric, but next time the characters should be somewhat more fleshed out. Most of the four points left to make a rating of 10 come from lack of character development, and the rest go towards the story execution--I feel this story had potential, but the slow and tedious buildup blew to climax while leaving us wanting more action in the buildup before the climax. I'd say it's worth a watch if it's still available on Netflix or some other movie subscription you may have, or even worth the $2 to rent.

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