Housewife: In Dreams, I Walk With You

I appreciate a well-crafted narrative as much as anyone, both because a well-told story is engaging for its own sake, and it because it can be enjoyable to appreciate the craftsmanship that goes into it. And you don’t always get that in horror film. Genre filmmaking is vulnerable to a reliance on cliché and timework expectations in general, and I think horror films are especially vulnerable to this - it’s very easy to make a commercially successful film that neglects character, mood, and skillful narrative in favor of cheap shock. And plenty of folks like that, but…I dunno. It feels like empty calories to me. So I like it when filmmakers actually make horror films that are actually films.

But…that’s not really what I’ve come here to talk about today. Today, I’ve come here to talk about films that concern themselves less with character and skillful narrative and more with just grabbing you by the collar and telling you to strap in because you are about to go for a ride. The kind of films that you just let wash over you.  

Housewife is very much one of those films, a striking combination of Dario Argento and David Cronenberg, a film more felt than thought about, a film that says pretty much from the start “hang on, because you are in for some weird shit.”

It begins with a big, old house, and a room with a shrine, dominated by a painting of a stern-looking woman, another woman praying feverishly to the picture. Elsewhere in the house, two little girls - sisters - stay inside their bedroom. They have to stay there when their mother is talking to “the visitors.” The older of the two discovers that she’s begun menstruating, and unsure of what’s happening, she calls for her mother. When her mother sees what has happened, she…well, she begins wailing in anguish. Acting like this wasn’t supposed to happen. Which isn’t encouraging. She tells the younger girl to stay in the bedroom, close her eyes, and play a counting game. She does, and counts, and keeps counting, and keeps counting. Her mother doesn’t come back. She opens her eyes to find the bedroom door open, so she walks out into the hallway, follows sounds of splashing…

…only to discover her mother drowning her older sister in the toilet.

The little girl is Holly, and both her sister and her father die that night by her mother’s hand. We don’t know why. We fast-forward to Holly’s adulthood. She’s married to a painter, Timucin, and they’re trying to have a child. Holly’s childhood left its mark - she really, really doesn’t like using toilets. But she and Timucin seem okay otherwise. And then an old friend - well, more than a friend - comes back into their life. Her name is Valery, and the three of them used to share a small place in New York, as well as a bed. Holly’s a little upset that Valery’s just shown up after two years of being incommunicado, and you get the sense that maybe this unconventional relationship didn’t end happily. But she’s here now because she’s in town for a seminar being held by a group called The Umbrella of Love and Mind. Is it a self-improvement workshop? Is it a cult that calls itself a “family” and teaches people to travel through the dreams of others?

Why not both?

So Holly and Timucin and a couple of their friends attend the seminar, and that’s where…well, it’s not where shit gets weird, because the whole thing starts weird, but it’s where it starts to get really weird. This is a film that is not really heavy on story or even plot - it sort of sets things up and then once the pieces are all in place it just starts stuffing imagery and ideas into your eyes in a way that’s engaging, even if it doesn’t always make clear, linear sense. In some ways, it’s very artificial - especially in the dialogue, which is stilted in a way that suggests it was translated or written by someone who wasn’t a native English speaker. I was actually sort of surprised that it wasn’t subtitled like the director’s previous film. This doesn’t help the narrative’s coherence, but what we lose there we gain in a pervasive strangeness. The characters aren’t explored in-depth, but they feel like people, and the relationship between Holly, Timucin, and Valery is communicated as much by showing as telling - details come out eventually, but well before that how the three of them interact gives you a pretty clear picture of who they were to each other. It’s a relationship that feels lived-in and intuitive. Other characters are less fleshed-out, but it doesn’t matter so much because once the table’s set, with Holly being singled out by the group’s enigmatic leader, Bruce O’Hara, it hurtles deliriously toward the end.

The film takes a lot visually from the work of Dario Argento - there’s a real giallo vibe to the cinematography, with lots of people in stylish, aggressively modern settings contrasted with flashbacks and dream sequences shot in soft focus, lighting heavy on reds, blues and golds, There’s a real dreamlike surrealism to these sequences that contrasts nicely with the stuff happening in the present and waking world, and the acting often has the same sense of operatic intensity you see in Argento’s work. This isn’t a naturalistic film, it’s stylized with distinct visual sensibilities used to locate parts of the film either inside or outside of the present and the real, establishing and then subverting the difference to good effect.

The story isn’t necessarily one that Argento would tell, though - narratively, it takes its cues from the early work of David Cronenberg. The meeting that Holly and Timucin attend has the same blandly sinister vibe present in Videodrome, that same intersection of salesmanship and showmanship putting a friendly face on something very dangerous. What the group does - “dream surfing” that allows them to walk around inside another’s subconscious - isn’t that far off from the strange psychology of The Brood or Scanners, and the nesting doll of a narrative, where dreams and reality commingle freely, isn’t that far off from the simulated worlds of eXISTENz. It doesn’t feel like plagiarism, just a lot of the same vibes and ideas put together for a different purpose, expressed with a distinct visual palette. This film doesn’t concern itself with Cronenberg’s questions about the relationship between biology and technology, or technology and autonomy. It has its own ideas about the new flesh, and as the film goes on, it moves from the psychological horror that you get when the line between the conscious and subconscious start to blur into the body horror of pregnancy and birth, ending on a startling note of cosmic horror that lingers just long enough for its punch to remain intact.

A lot of this recalls the director’s first film Baskin - the pervasive dreaminess sharply contrasted with gruesome, bloody imagery, the feeling that there’s something going on just outside of our awareness, the feelings that there’s more to this story than we’re getting. Like that film it doesn’t always make a whole lot of sense, but also like that film there’s a real sense of vision at work here, and this one feels more strongly realized, more self-assured than the director’s debut. It’s very much one of those films that you have to let wash over you and experience, rather than think too closely about - if you stop to think about it for too long, it kind of falls apart, but if you go along for the ride, well, it’s a hell of a ride. When the credits rolled, I sat up and said “DAMN!” out loud in the privacy of my own home, and that isn’t something that happens very often at all.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon