Every so often a film comes along that is so original and inventive it is difficult to find familiar categories to convey its appeal. House, a wonderfully off-kilter comedy, is such a film. It is a small Canadian movie adapted from a one-man play but in its own way, it shows more wit, ambition and imagination than anything that came out of Hollywood that year (1996). I recently watched the film again and was struck by how well it holds up - and how deserving it is of a wider audience.
HOUSE is a series of come/Gothic vignettes related by a neurotic/psychotic who is fresh out of group therapy and has a dead-end desk job at a septic-tank company. Its Nova Scotian-born star, Daniel MacIvor, won the Chalmers Award, Canada's top drama prize for writing the original play. Making his feature debut, Toronto director Laurie Lynd, who helped adapt the script, does a brilliant job of capturing - and enhancing - MacIvor's galvanic performance.
In adapting a play for the screen, a director usually tries to strip away the theatricality to make it more like a movie. Yet HOUSE, a play within a movie, is more cinematic and more theatrical than the stage show. Just as McIvor tried to break through the fourth wall of the stage, by talking directly to the audience, so do the filmmakers, by literally putting an audience in the picture.
After posting flyers on the main street of a small town, Victor (MacIvor) draws a motley group of 10 spectators to his one-man performance in a church. As he unravels stories of his dysfunctional life, one man responds with nervous laughter, a woman shifts uncomfortably in her seat, another viewers sits strangely enraptured. With unnerving aggression and an acid wit, Victor unleashes the rant of a loser. He asks why "rolling a ball between my fingers" is not considered as creative in group therapy as making lampshades with popsicle sticks. He talks of seeing the saddest man in the world, of discovering that his wife is a dominatrix - and his tales climax with the comic nightmare of him inviting his boss to the house for dinner. (Whenever Victor says "house", his arms fly up in exclamation: "It's not a show," he says. "It's my life. It's my house!") Expanding on the play, the film intersperses Victor's story with sweetly surreal fables, fantasy sequences enacted by the 10 spectators. And, in the end, they are the real house in HOUSE - a surrogate for the small, scattered audience that goes to see Canadian movies. This is one art-house film that deserves better.
