Warning, I’m gonna drop some spoilers, though there isn’t much to spoil.
You understand pretty early on that The Open House is one of those slow-burn thrillers–where there’s a creak here and bump there and all the occasional odd occurrences. Unfortunately, there is no bang at the end of that burning fuse.
Logan Wallace (played actually pretty well by Dylan Minnette) and his mother Naomi (Piercey Dalton) move into a mansion in the mountains after the untimely death of Logan’s father. The mansion is owned by Naomi’s sister and has been put up for sale, but she encourages them to move in while its on the market. Right away, this seems a little odd, and it’s clear that it’s simply an uncreative opening to a horror movie.
The scenery in the mountains is stunning, and the movie would have benefited from more shots of the mountains and sheer isolation of the area–shots from the sky showing the long, twisting road to the house with nothing but trees and rocks around them. The mansion itself is temporarily intriguing. It lacks the foreboding qualities that mansions in horror movies typically have. The long shadows, creaking floor boards, and cobwebs one expects, are not there. It’s a house on the market, after all. A modern house on the market, in fact. The rooms in the mansion, aside from the basement, are strangely bright. It’s as if every room is lit with the strongest LED lights the directors could find. I thought, surely, there is a reason for this, the way Midsommer uses the brightness of summer to magnify the horror. But there is no such reason, that I could ascertain, in The Open House.
But it isn’t the missed opportunity of using the landscape or the lack of dread around the mansion or the oddly bright lighting that ruins the film. I can deal with all that rather easily. After all, I’m a huge fan of shitty, low-budget exploitation films! What makes The Open House suck donkey balls is that nothing ever happens. Well, okay, that’s not true. Logan, Naomi, and Chris (Sharif Atkins) all die in unspectacular fashion. But there is no big revelation. No big reveal.
The viewer understands that after an “open house” in which multiple people apparently looked at the mansion, someone has likely decided to take up residence in the sprawling house alongside Logan and his mom. In fact, we get the idea that it could be multiple people. And it should have been! And the basement–the only creepy spot in the entire movie–should have been used to house them and whatever nefarious deeds they were up to. There could have been cults living in the tunnels of the basement. There could have been ritualistic sacrifices going on down there. There could have been a tribe of cannibals stripping the flesh from anyone who dared enter the house. Hell, Naomi’s sister could’ve been involved in the whole thing, adding a real edge to the twist that never materialized.
Instead of any of those things, we get your typical serial killer, who we never even get to really see. And in the end, we have this ridiculous shot of the apparent serial killer’s truck following a sign to another “open house.” Clearly, the directors were hoping for a sequel (let’s hope that never happens), but it’s idiotic idea that someone would drive around the countryside looking for “open houses” so he could murder people.
It’s not often that I suggest a complete pass on a movie, but that’s what I’ll do here.
However, if you want to see it, it’s on Netflix.