The Amazon Blumhouse originals just play it too safe. Their latest, "House of Spoils," from the talented pair behind the gnarly "Blow the Man Down," is another project under this banner that lacks the courage to follow through on its best ideas. It's stuck in neutral, another horror movie that threatens to get weird and powerful but ends up playing it depressingly safe. This movie is about primal instincts and a deeply feminine connection to Mother Earth—it needs to be dirty, grimy, and atmospheric. It is not enough of those things, stranding Oscar winner Ariana DeBose in a film that seems deeply uncertain about what story it's telling, shifting gears from a jump-scare horror flick into something that feels unearned in the final act. Jason Blum is a powerful, underrated force in the industry, but I wish he would empower his chefs to cook more interesting horror movie meals.
Written and directed by Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy, "House of Spoils" is the story of a chef (DeBose) who has been working in a prestigious restaurant for seven years under the tutelage of an esteemed talent named Marcello (Marton Csokas, doing a lot with a little bit of screen time). He finds her so gifted that he offers to double her salary when she informs him that she's quitting to start her own restaurant in the middle of nowhere, but she's determined to strike out on her own. With a testy investor named Andres (Arian Moayed), they plan to open a 'Destination Restaurant,' somewhere people would drive hours just to experience. Still, they're doing so at what's basically a remote haunted house. That should go well.
DeBose's unnamed chef moves into the creaky old house, where things immediately start going sideways. She starts to see bugs in some of the food, while the rest looks moldy and spoiled. She hears things at night and sees shadows, but Cole and Krudy don't have nearly enough atmosphere to make this section work. "House of Spoils" should be truly creepy, a story that blends the unimaginable pressure of a dream job with the supernatural but doesn't lean into either of them enough. We never really feel threatened by either the profession or the poltergeist.
Before long, our chef finds a garden deep on the estate that opens up her palette and menu. This is the best idea in Cole and Krudy's script, thinking haute cuisine has gotten too far away from the primal, living-off-the-earth aspect of cooking. The center of "House of Spoils," wherein the chef and her sous Lucia (Barbie Ferreira) develop a menu of unimaginable textures and flavors, is easily the film's best.
The problems come when "House of Spoils" has to remember it's an October horror movie but seems almost ashamed to do so. A movie that needs to get weird is as scared to go there as a chef who doesn't trust her own skills with a knife. And it leaves DeBose stranded. I've seen some already claim that she's over-acting here, and I would argue that she's at the register where the rest of the film seems incapable of meeting her, making her seem exaggerated due to the lack of tension that the film creates around her.
At one point, a restaurant critic (Amara Karan) destroys our heroine by telling her that her food has no risk, no soul, and no voice. I wouldn't go quite that far in describing "House of Spoils," but it's fascinating to watch a movie that criticizes how creative people can be hampered by their refusal to take risks in a film that does exactly that.
This review was filed from Fantastic Fest. It premieres on Amazon Prime Video on October 3rd.
