Review of In the House (2012) by Orlok W — 24 Jun 2014

This is an excellent suspense film with a surprising amount of laughs thrown in there. Perhaps what I enjoyed most about the film was how subversive it truly is. The film is definitely very meta, but not in as over-the-top way as you'd see in other forms of entertainment that are very self-referential.

I think this aspect actually works in favor of the film because it deals with Germain teaching Claude how to tell an effective story with compelling characters that have to overcome obstacles, offering criticism in order to improve Claude's storytelling abilities.

This mentoring of Germain towards Claude is Germain's way to live vicariously through Claude's writing, as his own writing was never good enough, and also a way to have a father-son relationship as it's probably too late for him and his wife to have kids.

But this mentoring definitely affects the way the story progresses. What I liked about the film is its approach to this mentoring, you can really see the change in Claude's approach to his story about desire in all the wrong places with each meeting he has with Germain.

The same kid that wrote that, fairly, innocuous first essay isn't the same kid that ended up doing what he did. You can see how he changes, improves, and matures as the film, and his relationship with Germain, progresses.

In that regard, the film is top-notch, because you can really grasp how Claude is improving as a writer and how he's becoming more and more 'ruthless' in the search of what he desires. It gets to the point where Claude doesn't really care who he hurts as long as he gets what he wants.

That's top-notch character development if you ask me. There's also a sense of unreliability about Claude, so that makes you question absolutely everything he writes. Which parts of it are true and which parts of it are his own imagination and embellishing upon that.

It's even to the point where I'm not even convinced that the ending I saw was a real ending. It could've all just been Claude writing his own perfect ending, or what he imagined the perfect ending would be for all those involved.

It's definitely something that gets you thinking about absolutely everything you see and that's not something a lot of films do effectively. The acting is strong, as was to be expected, but I definitely think the writing, unsurprisingly enough, is the real highlight of the film.

Just how clever and subversive the film really is, it's quite a joy to watch. The film has enough laughs to keep it from being tedious, for some, as I'm sure the "intellectual" tone of the film will put some off.

Still this is a great movie, I can't complain at all.